Bombay High Court extends stay on metro fare hike

Granting further relief to citizens of Mumbai, the Bombay high court on Tuesday extended the stay on the proposed fare hike of Mumbai Metro and transferred the matter for further hearing to Chief Justice of Bombay high court’s bench.

A division bench headed by Justice V.M. Kanade was hearing the petitions, including one by MMRDA, challenging the report of the Fare Fixation Committee as well as the proposal by R-Infra run Mumbai Metro One Private Limited (MMOPL) to hike fares. The court was also hearing an intervening application filed by Congress leader Sanjay Nirupam challenging the fare hike.

However, when the petitions came up for hearing on Tuesday the bench extended the stay on fare hike and transferred the matter before the bench headed by Chief Justice D.H. Waghela.

This petition was earlier being heard by former Chief Justice Mohit Shah’s bench and was transferred to Justice Kanade’s court after retirement of Justice Shah. Now the new CJ has come and hence Justice Kanade again transferred this matter before him.

The contention of MMOPL, which is operating the Versova-Ghatkopar corridor, is that due to various factors like delay of approximately six and a half years in handing over the land by the government, the cost of building infrastructure to run the Metro had escalated and now the operator was incurring a loss of `55 lakh on a daily basis and it wanted to increase the fare to get operational cost.

On the other hand MMRDA, challenged the hike alleging that the Centre was facilitating private profiteering.