Indian-American quits NY regional transport authority's key wing

New York Feb 13 (UNI) An Indian-American official who was in charge of major transport-related construction projects in the New York City area has resigned.

Mysore L. Nagaraja has been a top official at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), which includes the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) that serves the needs of commuters living in the neighbouring island.

Mr Nagaraja, 65, resigned his job as MTA's Capital Construction Company ending his longstanding association with the authority. His tremendous knowledge about MTA's most ambitious construction projects and the system's expansion was widely appreciated.

"Losing Mysore is a significant loss", Barry Feinstein, an MTA board member, said, according to a report in the Daily News.

But he is expected to continue with his work for this month at Capital Construction Company, a five-year-old entity.

Moving the mega projects (of MTA) forward is a real challenge, we are confident that Mr Nagaraja is the ideal person to get these jobs done, on time and within budget, an MTA statement quoted Kalikow as saying at the time.

Mr Nagaraja, a native of Mysore, is the youngest of 11 children in his family. In 1967, when Mr Nagaraja was in his 20s, he arrived in the United States after earning an engineering degree from the University of Mysore. His scholarship that year took him to Brigham Young University in Utah. Before he joined the MTA as a project manager in 1985, Mr Nagaraja had been managing a large capital construction project for M W Kellogg Company for several years.

He helped run and maintain about 1,000 km of track and some 470 stations in the MTA system, which transports nearly 8 million commuters daily.

Mr Nagaraja is expected to be a consultant for various metro projects in India.

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