The closed Kazipara metro rail station will resume operations from tomorrow (20 September).
Mohammad Abdur Rouf, managing director of Dhaka Mass Transit Company Limited (DMTCL) provided this information today (19 September).
“The Kazipara Station will open from tomorrow. A total of Tk20.5 lakh has been spent to make it operational. However, it’s being opened quickly with the convenience of people in mind. There are still many pieces of equipment needed, which will be fixed gradually, and costs may increase then.”
“Starting tomorrow, the metro rail will also operate on Fridays. However, on Fridays, it will run from 3:30pm till its regular night schedule.
“The headway (interval between two trains) will be 10 minutes, 8 minutes, and 12 minutes, depending on the time,” he added.
Yesterday, DMTCL issued an official order to operate the train service on Fridays from 20 September onward.
According to DMTCL directive, the metro rail will operate from Uttara North to Motijheel from 3:30pm to 9pm, and Motijheel to Uttara North from 3:50pm to 9:40pm every Friday.
During the “Complete Shutdown” programme of the Anti-Discrimination Students Movement, a group of people vandalised Mirpur-10 and Kazipara stations in the evening of 19 July.
They vandalised everything, including the station’s ticket vending machine and passenger entry punch machine at the stations, which forced them to keep the two stations closed for 37 days.
The metro operations resumed on 25 August, but the two stations remained closed.
Earlier, the estimated cost for repairing those stations was Tk300 crore, but later a committee was formed to further scrutinise the repairing cost.
“We hope that the repair cost of these stations will reduce as we are procuring equipment from the local market,” the managing director said.
He further said the final repair cost will be estimated after getting the report of the review committee.
According to relevant sources, Mirpur-10 station will take a few more months to become operational.
