At Rs 6,397 crore, Afcons bids lowest for 21-km tunnel for bullet train project

The 21-km tunnel, a showpiece infrastructure project, including a 7-km undersea tunnel at Thane Creek, is crucial to the corridor and is touted as the most challenging piece of civil engineering in the high speed rail corridor. It may take around 60 months to construct.

The bids were opened in February and there were only two.

The bullet train project is a 508-km corridor between Ahmedabad and Mumbai crossing Dadra and Nagar Haveli. Being executed with technical and financial assistance from Japan, the project will cost around Rs 1.1 lakh crore as estimated in 2015.

The tender has been fraught with controversy and it did not find Japanese participation in the first attempt in 2019-2020. There were concerns about the cost that had emerged from discussions with Japanese firms at that time.

Later, non-availability of land in Maharashtra was one of the reasons why the tender was cancelled in 2021. It was finally floated in September 2022.