The first full-day operation of the entire East-West Metro corridor revealed how vital the 16.6km link is — and how much the carrier needs to ramp up infrastructure and service to handle the surge in passengers.
Long queues
Around 3.45pm on Saturday, the eastern terminal of the Green Line — Sector V station — struggled to manage the crowd. Four ticket counters and a single vending machine were overwhelmed by the snaking queues. Hundreds waited to buy QR-coded paper tickets.
A couple of commuters gave up and walked back from the concourse to the station gates, some 70m away.
Sayani Bhattacharjee, a student of Rabindra Bharati University's Salt Lake campus, waited nearly 30 minutes for a token. “I don’t have a smart card. It is time to buy one,” said Bhattacharjee, who lives in Howrah and is pursuing a master’s degree in English.
The carrier made repeated public announcements urging passengers to shift to smart cards or use the Metro Railway app for ticket booking.
Some, like Abhishek Rana, downloaded the app while still in line. He was headed to Howrah to catch a train to his hometown, Durgapur.
A Metro employee at the station said they were already operating at stretched capacity. “Usually, three counters are open at this time. Today, there are four,” he said.
Some QR-coded paper tickets also took longer than usual to be read by the automatic fare collection (AFC) gates. A station official was on standby to assist passengers who got stuck.
Around 4.30pm, a Howrah-bound train rolled into Sector V station, already crowded with waiting commuters. “I have never seen this train so crowded on a Saturday,” a middle-aged man told his younger companion.
Seats were filled and passengers stood in the train as it left. Commuters trickled in at the next stations. But at Sealdah and Esplanade, more hordes of people crammed in and space came at a premium.
Expected numbers
The East-West Metro became fully operational on Friday evening with the commissioning of the 2.45km Sealdah-Esplanade stretch, connecting previously disjointed sections.
Earlier, combined daily footfall across the two halves was under one lakh. With the full corridor between Sector V and Howrah Maidan now open, authorities expect daily ridership to exceed six lakh.
By comparison, the Blue Line — Calcutta’s oldest Metro route of 32km from Shahid Khudiram (Briji) to Dakshineswar — handles over six lakh passengers daily with 262 trains on weekdays.
Peak-hour frequency on the Blue Line is around five minutes, while on the Green Line it currently stands at around eight.
“We will do the needful after we have a sense of the numbers. The full stretch has just become functional. It will take a few days,” a Metro official said. He added that announcements encouraging smart card usage and app-based ticketing would be intensified. “Regular commuters should not wait at the ticket counter,” he said.
Interchange stops
At Esplanade — the interchange station between the Blue and Green lines — the rush of transferring passengers exposed another shortfall: lack of staff assistance.
While signage was present, many commuters were confused about which platform to take and struggled to navigate the walkway between the two corridors. No Metro staff were seen guiding them.
A game-changer
Despite the teething troubles, passengers acknowledged the transformational potential of the fully functional Green Line.
Pallabi Naskar, 31, a Howrah resident and employee at an automobile firm, said her daily commute had drastically improved. “Earlier, I had to board a bus from Santragachi to reach my office in Sector V. It used to take two hours. Now, I can simply come to Howrah and take the Metro directly to Sector V. The journey is not only comfortable but also very safe for women,” she said.
The last trains leave Howrah Maidan at 9.45pm and Sector V at 9.47pm.