Bangladesh on Wednesday signed a loan deal with the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) to finance a metro rail project in capital Dhaka, aiming to curb traffic gridlock in the city.

Bangladesh's top economic policy-making body in December last year approved the 20-km metro rail service project scheduled to be implemented in three phases by 2022.

Of the total cost of 220 billion taka, JICA, a governmental agency of Japan which is responsible for the technical cooperation of its official development assistance programs, will provide 165. 95 billion taka, while the Bangladesh government will take care of the remaining 53.90 billion taka.

In the first phase, 11 kilometers would be completed by 2019 and 4.4 kilometers by 2020. The remaining 4.7 kilometers was expected to be completed by 2022.

The construction work of the metro rail that will link north Dhaka with the south is expected to begin this year.

Japan in 2011 expressed its interest to fund Bangladesh's first metro rail after a feasibility study found overhead construction of Dhaka's first mass transport system is possible.

An official earlier said the overhead construction of metro rail can help the Bangladeshi government's efforts to ease traffic gridlock in Dhaka which has only 436 km of 4-lane roads and 1,408 km of 2-lane roads.

The South Asian country's capital city has been experiencing severe traffic jams, creating untold suffering for commuters. It is apprehended that traffic jam would be worsening in the future if steps are not taken immediately to ease the situation. (1 U.S. dollar equates to about 80 taka) Endi

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