New Delhi: National High Speed Railway Corporation Limited (NHSRCL) has invited contract for construction of 21 km long tunnel for Mumbai-Ahmedabad High Speed Rail Corridor. About seven kilometers of the tunnel will be under the sea.
After the new government came to power in Maharashtra, the construction work for the bullet train corridor accelerated. Before that, tenders were called and construction work was abandoned later. Those tenders were renewed by the new government, PTI reported.
The tunnel will be constructed from an underground station in the Bandra-Kurla complex to Shilphatta in Thane. The tunnel is constructed using a special earth boring machine and the New Australian Tunneling Method (NATM). The undersea section of the seven-km-long tunnel will be India’s first undersea tunnel.
NHSRCL had invited contracts for the construction of the tunnel in November last year. But the contracts were canceled in 2022 citing ‘administrative reasons’. Although the contract was invited in 2019, no one came to take the contract. Tenders have been invited again in 2021. The previous government faced strong protests against the land acquisition process, including the Bandra-Kurla complex.