who took the initiative to plan the first underground railway in kolkata
Kolkata Metro The then Chief Minister of West Bengal, Dr. Bidhan Chandra Roy, first conceived the idea of building an Underground Railway for Kolkata in early 1950s. A survey was done by a team of French experts, but nothing concrete came of this. Efforts to solve the problem by augmenting the existing fleet of public transport vehicles hardly helped, since roads accounted for only 4.2% of the surface area in Kolkata, compared with 25% in Delhi and even 30% in other cities. With the goal of finding alternative solutions to alleviate the suffering of commuters, the Metropolitan Transport Project (Railways) (MTP) was set up in 1969.[5] The MTP (Rlys), with help of Soviet specialists (Lenmetroproekt) and East German engineers, prepared a master plan to provide five rapid-transit (metro) lines for the city of Kolkata, totalling a route length of 97.5Â km in 1971.[6] However, only three were selected for construction. These were: