The New Garia-Airport Metro stations coming up in New Town are likely to get renamed. The previous names, assigned long back, were proving to be misleading and confusing and so a proposal has been made to rename them.
A station coming up near City Centre 2 was to have been called Rabindra Tirtha, for instance. And the one near Nazrul Tirtha was previously called Bidhannagar.
So in a letter dated December 23, the state transport department informed Housing Infrastructure Development Corporation (Hidco) about their intention. “Hidco had sent us the proposal of renaming the upcoming Metro stations in New Town, which has been approved by us,” said a senior transport department official. The final go-ahead will come from the ministry of railways.
Metro projects are developed by the railways and it is they who name the station after the site or the locality to help identify them. The state government however may choose to rename them. A proposed name requires to be vetted by the home ministry if it is named after a personality but none of the nine stations in New Town have been renamed after any personality.
Debashis Sen, chairman and managing director of Hidco, said that the old names had been assigned long back, before the township got iconic landmarks like Biswa Bangla Convention Centre and Nazrul Tirtha.
“I have received formal petitions claiming that this is quite misleading, for instance, for a station in New Town to be named Bidhannagar,” said Sen.
A Metro spokesperson, however, said that they were yet to receive the notification about the name change. “We have not received any request for renaming the stations. We will look into it once we receive the request,” he said.
All the stations are being built by the Rail Vikas Nigam Limited (RVNL) on behalf of the Metro Railways.
The Metro will approach New Town from Wipro stretch, keep going till it takes a right turn at VIP Road after Chinar Park. It will culminate at the airport. Before entering Salt Lake Sector IV, the stations in the stretch along the EM Bypass are named after personalities like Satyajit Ray (SRFTI), Ritwik Ghatak (Kalikapur) and Hemanta Mukherjee (Ruby General Hospital).
“Work on nearly all the stations on the New Garia-Airport line have started and the one near City Centre 2, Nazrul Tirtha and the Biswa Bangla Convention Centre are almost complete,” said a Metro official. “Only the interior and fitment work in these stations remain, such as escalators.”
The Telegraph
