Bengaluru: The much-delayed tunneling of Namma Metro was completed on Friday when Krishna, a tunnel boring machine, emerged at the Kempegowda Station. With this, all underground tunneling work for Phase-I of Namma Metro’s mass rapid transit project got completed.

It took the tunnel boring machine nine months to bore through 747 meters. The completion of tunneling in Phase-I would facilitate trials in the North South corridor. If all goes well, Phase-I will be commissioned in April 2017.

The entire 17.9 km of the east-west corridor of Namma metro is operational, but only 12.4 km of the north-south corridor is open. Both the corridors intersect at Majestic and the delay in completing the underground stretch on the north-south corridor has stopped the entire 42-km network from becoming operational. Though the 8-km elevated south corridor was ready, the underground stretch linking it to the north corridor was not complete.