Covid derails Hyderabad Metro plan to get back on track

HYDERABAD: Even before the Hyderabad Metro rail could chug back to pre-Covid levels, in terms of passenger footfalls, the onslaught of the new Omicron variant has sent footfalls crashing again.
“Prior to the pandemic, the number of footfalls, hovered around 4 lakh per day for all the three metro corridors. After the second wave, footfalls had started increasing and touched 2 lakh around October last year as things slowly started getting back on track.But now it has slipped to around 1.3 lakh per day,” said a source at the Hyderabad Metro rail.
One of the key reasons for the sharp drop in footfalls is that most of the offices, that had opened up after the second wave, have once again gone back to work from home, either completely or on a rotation basis.
“I used to travel every day from Hitech City to Ameerpet and the metro used to be full during rush hours for the last few months. But now, I travel every alternate day and find nearly half the seats empty at any given time perhaps because many offices, like ours, have shifted to rotational work from office strategy,” said Kiranjyot Kaur, a techie working in Ameerpet area.
Apart from WFH, another factor is the scare of the contracting the highly transmissible Omicron variant while using public transport.
This despite the Hyderabad Metro rail authorities are putting in a lot of effort to take up frequent sanitisation activities. The authorities, however, feel that this, being the Sankranthi season, is not the right time to assess footfalls and a clear picture will emerge only later on.
But the fact remains that poor patronage is the main reason why the project for construction of the second phase of the metro is yet to take off.
“All the three corridors are having very little footfalls. While in pre-Covid daily footfalls had reached 4 lakh, it was expected that over the next two years footfalls would touch 8 lakh daily but this has not happened,” said an insider.