New Delhi, March 12 : The National High Speed Rail Corporation Limited (NHSRCL) on Friday launched an aerial LiDAR survey to prepare the detailed project report (DPR) for the proposed 736 km Mumbai-Nagpur high-speed rail (HSR) corridor.
The proposed Mumbai-Nagpur HSR corridor will connect Mumbai with cities or towns like Nagpur, Khapri Deport, Wardha, Pulgoan, Karanjalad, Malegaon Jahangir, Mehkar, Jalna, Aurangabad, Shirdi, Nashik, Igatpuri and Shahapur.
NHSRCL spokesperson Sushma Gaur said that the LiDAR survey for preparing the DPR for the Mumbai-Nagpur HSR corridor started on Friday, with an aeroplane fitted with state-of-the-art aerial LiDAR and imagery sensors taking its first flight and capturing the data related to ground survey.
She said the NHSRCL is adopting the light detection and ranging survey (LiDAR) technology as it provides all the ground details and data in three to four months, which otherwise would have taken 10-12 months.
She said the ground survey is a crucial activity for any linear infrastructure project as it provides accurate details of areas around the alignment.This technique uses a combination of laser data, GPS data, flight parameters and actual photographs to give accurate survey data.
“During the aerial LiDAR survey, 150m of area around the proposed alignment is being captured for the survey purpose.After the collection of data, three dimensional (3D) topographical maps of the corridor of the proposed alignment on a scale of 1:2500 will be available for designing the vertical and horizontal alignment, structures, location of the stations and depots, land requirement for the corridor, identification of project affected plots/structures, right of way etc.,” she said.
Gaur stressed that to provide clear pictures of the structures, trees and other minute ground details, 100 megapixel cameras are being used for the LiDAR survey.
The NHSRCL has been entrusted with the task of preparing DPRs for seven high-speed rail corridors and the LiDAR survey technique will be used for ground survey in of them.
The seven new proposed high speed rail corridors are — Delhi-Noida-Agra-Kanpur-Lucknow-Varanasi, Delhi-Jaipur-Udaipur-Ahmedabad, Mumbai-Nasik-Nagpur, Mumbai-Pune-Hyderabad, Chennai-Bangalore-Mysore, Delhi-Chandigarh-Ludhiana-Jalandhar-Amritsar and Varanasi-Patna-Howrah.
Union Railway Minister Piyush Goyal had said in a written reply to a question in the Lok Sabha earlier this week that the Railways has sanctioned the work of carrying out DPRs for the seven new high-speed rail corridors across the country to the NHSRCL, but work for none of the new corridors has been sanctioned so far.
He had said that the decision to sanction any HSR project depends on the outcome of DPR, techno-economic feasibility, availability of resources and financing options
.
