Mumbai Coastal Road Project: Second tunnel breakthrough today, what it means

This tunnel will become India's first undersea tunnel as a portion of this will pass beneath the Arabian Sea near Girgaon Chowpatty.

This tunnel will become India's first undersea tunnel as a portion of this will pass beneath the Arabian Sea near Girgaon Chowpatty. (Express photo)

Listen to this article

00:00

1x 1.5x 1.8x

The breakthrough of the second underground tunnel of the Mumbai Coastal Road Project (MCRP) is set to take place today (Tuesday) afternoon at around 2 pm at Priyadarshini Park (PDP) near Breach Candy. Maharashtra Chief Minister Eknath Shinde is expected to be present at the event of the tunnel breakthrough along with suburban Mumbai’s Guardian Minister Mangal Prabhat Lodha.

Civic officials of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) maintained that the tunnel boring machine (TBM) has almost reached the fag end of the breakthrough point and will be taken out from the breakthrough site.

In a bid to decongest traffic and vehicular movement in south Mumbai, the BMC is constructing a 10.58-km-long road that will connect the Princess Street Flyover near Marine Drive with the Bandra Worli Sea Link (BWSL) through a series of underground tunnels, arterial roads, and elevated flyovers.

Story continues below this ad

As part of the project, the BMC is constructing a 2.07 kilometre underground twin tunnels that will originate near Girgaon Chowpatty ahead of Marine Drive and end at PDP. This tunnel will become India’s first undersea tunnel as a portion of this will pass beneath the Arabian Sea near Girgaon Chowpatty.

The tunnel is being dug using a Tunnel Boring Machine (TBM) — Mavala. The BMC started digging of the first tunnel in January 2021 from the PDP end, and the first breakthrough took place in January 2022 at the Chowpatty end and later in April that year, the boring work for the second tunnel began.

The twin tunnels will have three separate carriageways each for vehicular movement, and will be equipped with state-of-the-art disaster resilient system and a saccardo ventilation system.

Built at a cost above Rs 12,000 crore, the MCRP is expected to bring down the travel time between Marine Drive and Worli to 10 minutes, which currently takes 45 minutes during peak hours.