Dhaka, October 31 Bangladesh’s Prime Minister sheikh Hasina Thursday laid the foundation stone of the country’s initial ever metro rail project.

The ceremony took place at Gazipur on the outskirts of capital Dhaka Thursday evening.

In February this year, Bangladesh signed a loan deal with the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) to finance the twenty.1-km metro rail service project scheduled to be implemented in 3 phases by 2022.

Of the entire value of 220 billion taka (around $2.8 billion), JICA, a governmental agency of Japan, can give about a hundred sixty five billion taka, whereas the Bangladesh government can give the rest.

In the initial phase, eleven km would be completed by 2019, 4.4 km more by 2020, and the remaining 4.7 km by 2022.

Bangladesh’s initial metro rail is expected to transport 60,000 passengers an hour, will help the Bangladeshi government’s efforts to ease traffic gridlock in Dhaka that has only 436 km of multilane roads and 1,408 km of two-lane roads.

It is apprehended that traffic jams would worsen in the future if steps aren’t taken immediately to ease the situation