Putting The Metro On The Fast Track
E Sreedharan
MD, Delhi Metro Rail Corporation
Elattuvalapil Sreedharan looks deceptively young at 70. The managing director of the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation, who can easily pass himself off as a man of 50, takes recourse to yoga and meditation to cope with the strain of his post-retirement career.
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The low-profile engineer from Palakkad has quite a job on his hand: he has to complete the first phase of the 61-km, Rs 12,600-crore project by December. The trial run for the project took place last week.
Sreedharan is thus running against time. He is of course not new to this kind of pressure. He handled it well when he completed the Konkan Railway project in 1997, in just seven years. Experts had warned the 760-km project would take 25 years.
This time, Sreedharan has to complete the entire project by 2005. Will he be able to keep the project on track? Sreedharan would say nothing, and rather let the massive urban infrastructure project do all the talking.
The unruffled manner in which construction is on at four bustling pockets in the Capital has already endeared DMRC to the denizens of the city. Sreedharan's experience with the Calcutta Metro, where he was part of the planning and design team between 1970 and 1975, must have definitely come handy. He was the deputy Chief Engineer in-charge of investigation, planning and design of India