One of Mumbai’s most under-developed railway stations — Parel — will be getting design inputs from students of the JJ School of Arts, when Central Railway begins the process of converting the rundown station into a suburban terminus. According to officials in the know, the file for the terminus project is now up for finance vetting, which is the last step before tenders are issued, and tenders worth over Rs60 crore might be issued by the end of August.
The plan to rope in JJ school students was taken recently and an official said the brief given to the institution is to come up with ways to make the station more passenger-friendly when it gets converted into the terminus. “We have an in-principle agreement with the institution; a formal tie-up will be done soon,” said a top-ranking CR official.
Parel, once a station tending to the mill workforce, the KEM and Tata Memorial hospitals and the railway establishments to the east of the tracks, is now one of the city’s worst commuting points, with authorities having to place Railway Protection Force personnel during peak hours to man the crowds on the south-end bridge. Women commuters are an especially harried lot as unsavoury elements are known to take advantage of the crowding on the steps leading to the bridge to inappropriately touch women commuters.
The project, after being given the green signal by former railway minister Sadananda Gowda on September 8 last year, went into cold storage soon after, only to be revived a few months ago.
The construction of the Route Relay Interlocking — the mechanism that controls all aspects of train movement over a particular stretch — cabin for the terminus has already begun in the south-east tip of Carol bridge that connects Parel east to Elphinstone west.
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