PROPOSED UNDERGROUND RAILWAY ROUTE, BOMBAY 1963

At present, Mumbai is undergoing massive construction of metro lines - both elevated and underground. But a proposed plan was already suggested way back in 1963, when the city was still called by its most popular name, Bombay.

This was the post-independent era, just 16 years after 1947. Maharashtra is just 3 years old and its capital Bombay is already one of the busiest cities in the world, let alone India. Just a year later the tram services would be shut permanently and Greater Bombay had just started to expand till Dahisar and Mulund (in 1957). The year 1963 was interesting as one less-known chapter in its history had occurred - a plan of underground railway in Bombay City.

PG Patankar, an engineer and railway expert deployed at BEST (Bombay or as how its called today, Brihanmumbai Electric Supply and Transport) had devised a 5-stage underground metro system, which if executed could have been the first underground railway system in India, much before Kolkata (1984) and Delhi (2002). Its phases were as follows:

1) Victoria Terminus to Victoria Terminus

2) Victoria Terminus to Byculla Bridge

3) Victoria Terminus to Byculla Bridge via Bombay Central

4) Byculla Bridge to Sion

5) Byculla Bridge to Mahim

A map was devised on which certain underground metro stations were marked such as Mahim Terminus, Shivaji Park, Gokhale Road Junction, Fergusson Road, Arthur Road Junction, Bellasis Road, Thakurdwar, Dhobi Talao, Central Library, Sachivalaya, Fort Market, Victoria Garden, Byculla Terminus, Curry Road, Dadar TT, King's Circle and Sion Terminus. Covering roughly a length of 32 kms, the route would have connected the entire Bombay City, starting from Mahim to Fort.

Railway system in Mumbai had always experimented with time. A range of stations that once existed became redundant because of excessive traffic and accidents - Colaba, Ballard Pier Mole, Agra Road, Kolovery etc. The tram route that ran between 1874 to 1964 - from Colaba to Pydhonie via Kalbadevi, and today's metro phases which started in 2014 and is still in its development phase. Mumbai today also has a monorail route which starts from Chembur is planned to go as far as Thane and Kalyan. But this vintage underground railway plan was forgotten with time and saw light only in 2014 - 51 years after its original inception.

The map here shows the underground railway route in green while the existing local train route in red. Since the time is 1963, stations such as Koliwada (renamed as Guru Teg Bahadur Nagar in 1977), Bombay Central (Mumbai Central since 1995) and Ballard Pier Mole (interestingly, this station was shut in 1944 but appears on Patankar's map) are still shown on the map. The underground metro's workshops were planned to be at Sachivalaya (later, Mantralaya) and Bellasis Road (officially Jehangir Boman Behram road). And as the fate decided, Patankar died in 2013 and just the very next year, metro construction started with an announcement of having an underground railway from Colaba to Bandra.