Motijheel-Uttara Metro Rail To Start On Nov 5

Metro rail will run on Motijheel-Uttara section between 7:30am and 11:30am from November 5, a day after its inauguration by the Bangladesh prime minister, Sheikh Hasina.

The fare for Uttara-Motijheel route will be Tk 100.

From November 5, metro rail will continue to run on Agargaon-Uttara section from 7:30am till 8:30pm while train on Agargaon-Motijheel route will stop running after 11:30am.

For the inauguration, metro rail service would remain closed on November 4.

Currently, the Mass Rapid Transit line 6, popularly known as metro rail, is running for 12 and half-an-hours between 8:00am and 8:30pm taking passengers from all the nine stations on the Uttara–Agargaon route every day except Friday.

The prime minister launched the country’s first-ever electricity-powered elevated and air-conditioned rail system on the 11.73-kilometre-long Uttara–Agargaon route on December 28, 2022.

MAN Siddique, the managing director of Dhaka Mass Transit Company Limited, implementing agency of the metro rail, at a press briefing on Wednesday (November 1) said that the three stations — Farm Gate, Bangladesh Secretariat and Motijheel—will open initially on Agaragaon-Motijheel section and the rest will open within three months.

Within three months, the time will also be adjusted, he added.

After inauguration, the service on the 20.1-kilometre-long Uttara–Motijheel route will become commercially operational while the entire 21.26-kilometre-long Uttara–Kamalapur route is scheduled to be inaugurated in June 2025.

According to the DMTCL, till September the physical progress of the Agargaon-Motijheel section was 96.96 per cent and of the Motijheel-Kamalapur 13.94 per cent.

Still works are ongoing under the section’s stations at Bijoy Sarani, Farm Gate, Karwan Bazar, Shahbagh, Dhaka University, Bangladesh Secretariat and Motijheel.

The initial cost of the MRT Line-6 project was Tk 21,985.07 crore, and the deadline for it was June 2024.

The revised cost now stands at Tk 33,471.99 crore, and a new deadline has been set for December 2025.