Tunnelling through 10 km under the city took 5 years to complete

 Tunnelling through a little more than 10 km on the east-west and north-south corridors took fives years. The Bangalore Metro Rail Corporation Ltd Rs spent 1,700 crore on the entire underground work, which was divided into two packages (UG-1 and UG-2).

Coastal-TTS JV had won the contract (UG-1) for the North-South corridor, which included tunnelling 4.1-km from south ramp to Majestic and construction of two stations with ramps at City Market and Chickpet stations. The project cost was Rs 705 crore.

The work of tunnelling on UG-1, which had started in December 2012 with Krishna at City market, came to end with the same machine emerging on Friday at Majestic. Although it was a relatively small stretch compared to UG-2 package, BMRCL cited reasons like dense population, cracks in buildings and tough terrain for the delay. In all, four TBMs (Krishna, Kaveri, Margarita and Godavari) were deployed to tunnel about 5,076 metres.

On the other side, CEC–Soma-CICI JV won the contract (UG-2) on the east-west corridor (4.8-km) for tunnels and four stations with a ramp between Cubbon Park station (Minsk Square), Vidhana Soudha station, Sir M Visveswaraya station (Central College) and City Market station.

The cost of the project, which is already operational, was Rs 995.20 crore. In addition, the contract for the underground Majestic inter-change station was awarded to GYT-Coastal (JV) separately. BMRCL MD promised to finish the work by December this year.