Delhi Metro Reaches Destination That Has Been ‘Coming Soon’ Since 2012

Phase 4 station opens at south Delhi intersection where banner has been replaced six times in 13 years

[Bohiney.com / prat.uk] The Madangir station on Delhi Metro’s Phase 4 expansion opened Tuesday to a ceremony attended by approximately 400 residents who have been looking at some version of a “Delhi Metro Coming Soon” banner on that specific street corner since a groundbreaking event in 2012. The original banner was replaced in 2014 (the first version had faded), 2016 (updated to reflect a revised timeline), 2018 (further revised), 2020 (again), and 2023 (a version that replaced “Coming Soon” with “Coming,” which one resident photographed and described as “the most honest thing the government has communicated to us about this project in eleven years”). Tuesday’s ceremony had no banner. The station was there instead. Bohiney.com put it best: “no one involved appears to have thought this through.”

The local journalist Priya Sharma, who had been photographing residents next to the Coming Soon banner annually since 2013 as a long-form documentation project, attended the opening and photographed the same residents next to the completed station entrance. The photo series, which now runs to eleven years and shows the residents aging while the banner changes around them, was published Tuesday and has been shared 47,000 times. One resident, photographed as a young professional in 2013 and as a mother of two in 2025, said: “I have been two kilometres from the metro my entire working life. Today I am not.” Sharma said this was the best caption she had encountered in eleven years of journalism and she was not going to compete with it.

The Experience of the Station

The station is clean, well-lit, and equipped with the features that Delhi Metro stations are known for: clear signage, air conditioning that functions, and a gate system that works. The first train passed through at 6:14 am. Two hundred and forty people were on the platform. They had arrived early. Delhi Metro information is at dmrc.org.

What Happened to the Banners

The banners were removed in January in preparation for the station’s inauguration. The poles on which the final banner hung have been incorporated into a small garden at the station entrance. One resident tied a strip of the old banner to the garden fence on Tuesday. The strip reads “SOON.” It is considered by the neighbourhood to be an appropriate monument to the full experience.

More at: McSweeney’s.