Kathmandu Metro Rail: Kathmandu Valley Electric Rail Project Tracker

Kathmandu has no metro, monorail or urban railway in operation or under construction. What exists, as of mid-2026 (Asar 2083 BS), is a government study programme. On 18 May 2026 (Jestha 2083 BS) the Department of Railways (DoR), under the Ministry of Physical Infrastructure and Transport, published an international Expression of Interest (EOI) notice inviting consulting firms to prepare a Detailed Project Report (DPR) for a proposed 27.5-kilometre electric rail loop inside the Kathmandu Valley. The notice was issued through the Rail, Metrorail and Monorail Development Project, the DoR unit in Bishalnagar, Kathmandu, that handles the valley's urban rail plans.

In practical terms, the project is still at the paperwork stage. A pre-feasibility study has identified possible corridors, and the DPR now being procured is meant to decide whether the system should be a conventional metro, a monorail or another form of electric rail. No technology has been chosen, no land has been acquired, no financing for construction has been arranged and no contractor has been hired. Any opening date circulating on social media is speculation, not an official commitment.

The EOI, published on the Public Procurement Monitoring Office's electronic government procurement portal (bolpatra.gov.np/egp), sought international consulting firms to prepare the DPR for the construction of a rail, metro rail or monorail system in the Kathmandu Valley. Firms had to submit applications online by 12:00 noon on 15 June 2026. DoR information officer Bodh Bhandari told the Kathmandu Post that the selected consultant will be given 18 months to complete the study.

The government has allocated more than Rs 323.37 million for this multi-year study, and the notice states that the entire cost will be financed from the Government of Nepal's own budget rather than foreign loans or grants. According to the published notice, EOI applications are scored on the consulting firm's qualifications and key personnel (50 percent), experience (40 percent) and capacity (10 percent), with a minimum of 70 points required to qualify.

The DPR is the decisive technical document: it will fix the alignment and station locations, forecast passenger demand, recommend the transport technology, produce detailed cost estimates and propose a financing and implementation model. The tender follows a pledge in the federal budget for fiscal year 2082/83 BS (2025/26) that detailed study reports for the Kathmandu metro rail, alongside the Birgunj–Kathmandu railway, would be prepared.

The line now heading into detailed design is a closed loop of about 27.5 kilometres connecting Narayan Gopal Chowk (Maharajgunj) with Chabahil, Koteshwar, Satdobato in Lalitpur and Ratnapark before returning to Narayan Gopal Chowk. The corridor combines the eastern and southern arcs of the Ring Road with a spine through the city centre, and the pre-feasibility study proposes building it as an elevated line to avoid the valley's difficult ground conditions and dense underground utilities.

The loop is only the first of five electrified urban rail corridors that DoR pre-feasibility work has identified in the Kathmandu Valley. Aman Chitrakar, a former DoR official involved in the earlier studies, has described a combined electrified network of 77.28 km across the five projects, although the individually published line lengths are indicative and will be revised in the DPR stage.

The DoR unit's full name — the Rail, Metrorail and Monorail Development Project — reflects a debate that has never been settled. Monorail advocates argue that its narrower elevated guideway, tighter turning radii and lower civil-works cost suit Kathmandu's cramped streets; a 2018 feasibility study by China Railway 25 Bureau Group estimated a monorail along the 27 km Ring Road at about Rs 116 billion with a three-year construction period. Metro advocates counter that a conventional metro carries far more passengers per hour and uses standardised technology proven across South Asian cities, making it the only mode that could meaningfully cut the valley's traffic congestion in the long run.

The valley imposes hard constraints on either choice. Transport experts quoted by the Annapurna Express note that many candidate corridors are only around 12 metres wide where roughly 22 metres would be desirable for comfortable elevated construction. The valley floor is soft lakebed sediment, which complicates tunnelling, and the 2015 Gorkha earthquake underlined the seismic risk any structure must withstand. Kathmandu's seven UNESCO World Heritage monument zones further restrict where columns, viaducts or station boxes can go — one reason two of the five studied lines are planned underground despite the higher cost.

A third camp argues the valley should fix buses first. The early-2010s feasibility study priced a Kathmandu metro network at about Rs 553.20 billion, and experts told the Annapurna Express that inflation has since roughly doubled that figure — an enormous sum for Nepal — while electric buses and better traffic management could deliver visible relief within years rather than decades.

The valley's only completed electric transit project remains the Kathmandu–Bhaktapur trolleybus. Built with Chinese assistance and opened on 28 December 1975 (Poush 2032 BS), it ran 13 km from Tripureshwar to Suryabinayak and at its peak in the 1980s carried up to 10,000 passengers a day. Chronic mismanagement and losses forced a suspension from December 2001 to September 2003; the revived service covered only the 5 km inner section to Koteshwar, was suspended for good in November 2008, and the system was formally closed in 2009. The dead trolleybus has haunted every mass-transit proposal since.

Modern rail plans have repeatedly surfaced and stalled. A Korean consultant completed a metro feasibility study for the DoR in 2012 (2068/69 BS) that identified the five-line network, but the report was never acted on. In 2017 a Japanese-supported urban transport master plan recommended at least two metro lines by 2030 — a target that is now unreachable. In May 2018 the Investment Board Nepal's plan for an 800-million-US-dollar Kathmandu monorail collapsed when the prospective developer failed to deposit a Rs 100 million performance guarantee, triggering a Supreme Court stay and the eventual termination of the process. The same year, Kathmandu Metropolitan City signed memoranda with China Railway 25 Bureau Group of China Railway Construction Corporation for a Ring Road monorail feasibility study (submitted September 2018) and then a DPR (December 2018, under then mayor Bidya Sundar Shakya) — yet no construction ever began. In February 2021 (Falgun 2077 BS) the DoR itself assigned a Chinese consultant to prepare a DPR for the Satdobato–Ratnapark–Maharajgunj corridor, extended the deadline into 2023, and quietly got nothing usable — which is why the same loop is being re-tendered in 2026.

Money is the project's biggest unanswered question. The 2012 study's estimate of about Rs 553.20 billion — before the doubling experts now assume — already approached a third of Nepal's entire annual federal budget of the mid-2020s, and no financing model has been fixed. Public-private partnership, government-to-government deals and multilateral loans have all been floated across the various failed attempts; for now, even the DPR is being paid for from domestic resources, which the government presents as a sign of seriousness but which also means no development partner has yet committed to the rail project.

Meanwhile, development banks are backing cheaper, faster modes. The Asian Development Bank's Kathmandu Valley Urban Transportation System Project (project 59163-001) is a technical assistance for cable-propelled transit — a ropeway — whose pre-feasibility work identified the Bishnumati river corridor as a suitable urban route that avoids UNESCO heritage sites. A separate ADB Sustainable Urban E-mobility Project (58217-001) is preparing electric bus fleets and intelligent transport systems for the Kathmandu and Pokhara valleys, building on Sajha Yatayat's battery-electric buses that have operated in the capital since 2022. Realistically, these bus and ropeway projects are the valley's near-term transit upgrades while the rail question is studied yet again.

No official completion date exists, and the arithmetic of the current process sets a hard floor on any answer. If the DPR consultant is contracted in late 2026 or 2027, the 18-month study runs to around 2028–2029. Only then can the government choose a technology, take an investment decision, arrange financing worth hundreds of billions of rupees and procure contractors — steps that in comparable projects take several years. Elevated urban rail lines of this size typically need four to six years of construction, so even a best-case scenario puts trains in the early-to-mid 2030s, and Nepal's project history argues for caution about best cases.

For readers tracking the project, the meaningful milestones are concrete and public: the shortlisting and award of the DPR contract on the bolpatra e-procurement portal, line items for the Rail, Metrorail and Monorail Development Project in each year's federal budget (red book), an official metro-versus-monorail decision when the DPR is submitted, and any signed financing agreement with a development partner or foreign government. Until those appear, the honest status of the Kathmandu metro remains what it has been for a decade: a serious idea, under study, with no construction underway.