Will pay 50 per cent of funds if Centre foots rest, says Delhi CM Kejriwal

New Delhi: Amid a face-off with the Centre over the proposed Metro fare hike, chief minister Arvind Kejriwal on Sunday offered to take over the DMRC to make it more efficient and said his government was ready to provide half the funds needed to meet the gap in its finances for three months.

In a letter to Union housing and urban affairs minister Hardeep Singh Puri, Mr Kejriwal said the Centre bore the entire loss of Kolkata Metro and there should be no difficulty if it provided half the funds in the case of Delhi.

Mr Puri had on Friday told the Delhi government it would need to pay Rs 3,000 crore annually for five years if it wanted to stop the Metro fare hike. Mr Kejriwal said Mr Puri’s contention that the DMRC was bound to follow the fare fixation committee’s recommendatio-ns seemed “untenable”.

Citing Section 86 of the DMRC Act, he said it was the Centre, which had set up the fourth FFC after a lapse of seven years. Therefore, Mr Puri’s contention that the Centre was “powerless” in respect of fare fixation was “flawed”. The FFC-recommended fare hike, second in seven months, will come into effect on October 10. He said the government was confident it would be able to fund the DMRC by improving its efficiency rather than effecting steep fare hikes.

“As for your suggestion regarding a grant to the DMRC for meeting the gap in its finances, my government is willing to bear half the grant if only the Centre provides a matching grant,” the dchief minister said. “As you know, the Centre and the Delhi government are 50:50 owners of DMRC and its equity  etc have been shared in this proportion all along,” Mr Kejriwal said. 

“Let an assessment be made of the financial gap likely to be created on account of postponement of the second fare hike and we will be able to bear half of it,” he said. Sources in the Delhi government said the CM offered to provide on a short-term basis half the funds the DMRC needed to meet the gap in its finances.