Was there more to scuttling the Skybus Metro project than just the accident that followed many successful test runs? It would be a folly to suspend work on the ongoing monorail project which suffered an accident last week. Also, the government should reconsider its decision on the Skybus Metro

On Friday, at about 6.30 in the evening, one of the two monorail curved guide-way beams collapsed during erection work, in the suburban Chembur area. What went wrong? After all, the whole team working on the job were a competent lot-whether it is the project management consultants M/s Louis Berger, civil works contractors M/s Larsen & Toubro, the monorail technology designers, manufacturers, suppliers and operators M/s Scomi of Malaysia, and on the MMRDA (the implementing agency) side, a team of engineers, largely retired railway engineers.

Three separate inquiry committees are being proposed. One each by the project management consultants and the civil works contractors, and a third is expected to be made up of independent experts to be appointed by the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA).

'Support system failure' and that 'the beam is on the sharpest curves' have been mentioned as possible reasons for the accident. These are premature statements. The pictures do show that the adjoining curved span is already erected and the two guide-way beams appear to be sitting in place safely. Let us await the inquiry and safety audit report expected during this week.

But the question that one needs to answer is should we shelve the monorail project on account of this accident? Or should we find out why this happened and overcome the problem and go ahead with it?"

The reason why this question is being raised is because there is a precedence where a mode of transport was 'discarded' by the Ministry of Urban Development and Indian Railways after the unfortunate of a death of a Konkan Railway engineer, in an un-conceived accident that occurred on 24 September 2004, during a test run of the 'infamous' Skybus. MMRDA never considered the Skybus seriously and the railway engineers, being a conservative lot, did not give room for innovations.

B Rajaram, who succeeded E Sreedharan as managing director of KRCL, believed that the Skybus could enthuse his engineers to devote time in converting the concept into a stationary prototype model and put it up in Madgaon in Goa. Then prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee was very impressed by the prototype during his visit to Goa. The then Railway Minister, Nitish Kumar, sanctioned Rs50 crore for making the test track and operating a prototype, while on a visit to the state back in 2003.

With this assurance, Mr Rajaram got the 1.6 km test track constructed before the monsoon of 2004 and commenced testing with limited instrumentation installed. Testing was going on so smoothly that the media was also taken on a ride. Some bureaucrats visiting Goa at the time are also said to have gone on a ride.



The details about the accident would take considerable space and this is not a discussion of failure modalities but whether a failure should determine the fate of the mode, hence I am skirting around it. The fatality occurred because the KRCL engineer was so confident after the flawless trials over a fortnight that he did not put the harness and did not keep the 4 metre wide door shut.

For three months, no work was allowed to be carried out. Only in January 2005 was further testing permitted and then the performance was made public by Mr Rajaram. Many months prior to the mishap, in Decmber 2003, the Ministry of Urban Development formed an experts' committee, headed by Prof PV Indiresan, former director of IIT Madras, to ascertain the viability of the Skybus Metro. It comprised of officials from the railways, the executive director of carriages RDSO (Research Designs & Standards Organisation), not to forget a director of the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation. In summary, its report recommended that the Government of India provide another Rs60 crore to be spent over a period of two years to get the 'technology' fully tested. A couple of paragraphs from the experts' committee report on the Skybus is in order:

6. Critical Evaluation of the systems integration

KRCL has demonstrated within the limited scope and time that it is possible to have a 1.6 km track and system made operational. KRCL has explained the fatal accident that occurred and KRCL has said that additional precautions have been taken to prevent such accidents in the future. The coach and the station design require further development.

The Committee finds that in spite of the accident during trials, the KRCL design holds much promise, though its full capabilities are yet to be proven.

7.10    We, in India, suffer from the colonial hangover and think that all innovations have to come from abroad. We are skeptical of Indian technology. This report has tried to avoid that bias. Whether the Skybus fulfils all its hopes or not, this project will give confidence to Indian engineers that the government will back up Indian innovation as far as possible. Inspiring such confidence, too, is important, because we cannot live on borrowed technology forever, and should learn to develop our own inventions, and for that reason, learn to place confidence in Indian technology.

This simply means that we must learn from accidents and incorporate additional safety features in the design and construction and avoid accidents altogether. This is what will happen with the monorail project. The question that needs to be answered is, "Why was the Skybus not given its due, given the fact that it competed very well with monorail and challenged the metro rail in terms of costs and capacity."

The Skybus has one feature that neither the metro rail nor the monorail has. It has a deck that is 11 metres wide, as much as the Marine Drive seaside footpath, as part of the girder structure spanning between two columns. This open space becomes available to people starved of accessible open public space in Mumbai. More important, this deck becomes available to people to walk on in the case of an emergency like the deluge in Mumbai in 2005. Any infrastructure should cater to the disaster situation. Neither the metro rail nor the monorail provides this facility that the Skybus provides. Therefore, it is still not late to consider the Skybus for two routes, running 40 km, one for the western suburbs and one for the eastern suburbs.



[Sudhir Badami is a civil engineer and transportation analyst. He is on the Government of Maharashtra's Steering Committee on Bus Rapid Transit System (BRTS) for Mumbai and the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority's (MMRDA) technical advisory committee on BRTS for Mumbai. He is also member of the Research & MIS Committee of Unified Mumbai Metropolitan Transport Authority (UMMTA). He was a member of the Bombay High Court-appointed erstwhile Road Monitoring Committee (2006-07). He has been an active campaigner against noise pollution for over a decade and he is a strong believer in a functioning democracy. He can be contacted on email at [email protected].]

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