This story is from June 20, 2020

Unlocked: East-West Metro work starts below Bowbazar

Unlocked: East-West Metro work starts below Bowbazar
Kolkata: East-West Metro’s tunnelling at Bowbazar resumed on Friday after three months.
The tunnelling had stopped for maintenance of the tunnel boring machine (TBM) on March 19 after which the nationwide lockdown was announced on March 24. The project, hit by a tunnelling fiasco that led to largescale subsidence in the area last year, had resumed on February 18 on Calcutta High Court’s orders.
metro timeline

Friday’s work started not far from the epicentre of the cave-in, Durga Pithuri Lane, off Bowbazar, where the TBM digging the west-bound tunnel had hit an aquifer on August 31, last year.
Several dilapidated buildings fell like a pack of cards as water gushed into the giant borer and work was stalled for 170 days. The TBM, nicknamed Chundee, is now lying defunct 14m below Durga Pithuri Lane. Its twin, Urvi, building the east-bound tunnel, will dig around 800m to reach Sealdah station, from where it must take U-turn to complete Chundee’s unfinished job — building the rest of the west-bound tunnel. The two TBMs, commissioned for the last leg of 2.45km of underground tunnelling between Esplanade and Sealdah, will be pulled out of this spot when Urvi completes the tunnelling in about a year from now.
When it stopped for maintenance in March, Urvi had made 1,224 rings and covered around 230m from the curve at Nirmal Chunder Street, through the serpentine lanes of Gour De Lane and Shykrapara Lane before reaching Durga Pithuri Lane, where the tunnelling fiasco took place. Urvi resumed operations from here, at the junction of Durga Pithuri Lane and Shykrapara Lane. The TBM must cover around 70m to reach the main road, BB Ganguly Street, from where it turns right towards Sealdah station. The place from where it started digging on Friday is now an open area — 27 houses, which fell or were partially damaged when Chundee hit the aquifer in the area had to be razed.

The Covid-induced lockdown has pushed commissioning of the entire 16km Howrah Maidan-Sector V link further even as a truncated 5km section along the elevated Sector V-Salt Lake stadium stretch was inaugurated on February 13. When the lockdown ends, the operations are likely to be extended till the underground Phoolbagan station as the Commissioner of Railway Safety (CRS) gave the mandatory safety nod on Wednesday.
Even as the Centre gave a go-ahead to infrastructure projects on May 14, the beleaguered East-West Metro wasn’t one of them because the Bowbazar area was a Red Zone. Several local residents evacuated for the tunnelling were still put up in various hotels. Among them were 45 slum dwellers who had to be shifted on March 13 as cracks surfaced on the walls of their homes at 3 Gour De Lane. As the lockdown eased, the evacuees were sent back home and Kolkata Metro Rail Corporation (KMRC), the agency implementing the Metro link, started making preparations to restart Urvi all over again.
KMRC and ITD Cementation, the construction company executing the project, have had to mobilize some workers even amid the lockdown to maintain the TBM.
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