Delhi Metro's Blue Line, Pink Line to resume services from Wednesday after 171-day hiatus

NEW DELHI: Delhi Metro's Blue Line and Pink Line are set to resume operations on Wednesday after being closed for 171 days due to the COVID-19 pandemic, officials said. On Monday, the Delhi Metro had resumed services on its Yellow Line, with curtailed operations and a slew of measures for safety of passengers and employees.

Metro services in Delhi-NCR were closed since March 22 due to the pandemic.

The Ministry of Home Affairs had recently issued guidelines allowing the Delhi Metro to resume operations in a graded manner, following which the DMRC had said it would be done in three stages from September 7-12.

Under stage one, Yellow Line or Line 2 and Rapid Metro were made operational with restricted service hours.

Trains are to operate in batches of four-hour each from 7-11 AM in the morning and 4-8 PM in the evening in the first stage, it said.

While nearly 15,500 passengers availed the Yellow Line and Rapid Metro combined on Monday, on Tuesday, the figures after the the end of services at 11 AM, stood at 8,300, officials said.

"As part of the stage-I of graded resumption of metro services, the Delhi Metro will resume operations after 171 days on its Blue Line i.e, Line-3/4 from Dwarka Sec -21 to Electronic City/Vaishali (65.35 km, 58 stations) and Pink Line i.e, Line-7 from Majlis Park to Shiv Vihar (57.58 km, 38 stations) from tomorrow," the DMRC said in a statement.

Services will be available on both of these lines from 7-11 AM in the morning and from 4-8 PM in the evening along with Yellow Line and Rapid Line which are already operational as per the given timings, it said.

The re-opening of these two Lines will ensure availability of nine of the existing 28 interchange metro stations from Wednesday, including Rajouri Garden (Blue Line & Pink Like); INA Delhi Haat (Yellow & Pink Line); Mayur Vihar Phase - I (Blue Line & Pink Line); Rajiv Chowk (Blue Line & Yellow Line); Anand Vihar ISBT (Blue Line & Pink Line) and Sikanderpur (Yellow Line & Rapid Metro), the DMRC said.

The list of gates which will remain open for entry of passengers at each station along with all necessary updates are available on the home page of Delhi Metro's official website www.delhimetrorail.com for easy access of the passenger information, it said.

In addition to above lines, three more lines- Red Line i.e, Line-1 from Rithala to Shaheed Sthal New Bus Adda (Ghaziabad); Green Line i.e, Line-5 from Kirti Nagar/Inderlok to Brig. Hosihar Singh (Bahadurgarh); and Violet Line i.e, Line-6 from Kashmere Gate to Raja Nahar Singh (Ballabhgarh) will also resume services from from September 10 with the same time schedule, it said.

The entire metro network is planned to be made operational for passenger services throughout the day from September 12 onwards as it was before March 23 with all social distancing norms and guidelines to be followed by the passengers during the travel due to ongoing pandemic.

Wearing masks is mandatory inside train coaches and at stations' premises, it said.

The DMRC has appealed to people to use the rapid transport only if urgently needed.