The National High Speed Rail Corp. Ltd (NHSRCL) opened the technical bids for one of its biggest tenders for a substantial part of the Mumbai-Ahmedabad High Speed Rail (MAHSR) corridor’s alignment and four stations on September 23. This involves bids for the design and construction of the 237 km length of the high-speed mainline from Mumbai to Ahmedabad. This tender covers about 47 per cent of the total alignment of 508 km between Vapi and Vadodara in the state of Gujarat including four stations, viz. Vapi, Billimora, Surat and Bharuch, 24 rivers and 30 road crossings. This entire section is in Gujarat state where more than 83 per cent of the land has already been acquired for the project. A total of three bidders involving seven leading Indian companies from the infrastructure space have participated in the competitive bidding. These include a consortium of Afcons Infrastructure Ltd, IRCON International Ltd and JMC Projects India Ltd, Larsen & Toubro Ltd and a consortium of NCC Ltd, Tata Project Ltd and J Kumar Infra Projects Ltd. The MAHSR project is projected to create more than 90,000 direct and indirect jobs during the construction phase. Besides, the ecosystem for the production and manufacturing of components for future high-speed rail projects is also expected to get a boost. It is estimated that nearly 7.5 million tonnes (MT) of cement, 2.1 (MT) of steel, and 140,000 MT of structural steel will get utilised in the construction, with everything being produced in India. The market for large construction machinery is also likely to majorly benefit from the project. Railways Seeks DPRs on 7 New Bullet Train Corridors Experts point out that the country would need to build many more bullet train corridors in the future. “The Mumbai-Ahmedabad corridor is only the beginning. We would need more bullet train corridors. In my assessment, the country would need 8,000 to 10,000 km of bullet train corridors,” Achal Khare, Managing Director, NHSRCL had told INFRASTRUCTURE TODAY in an interview. Earlier this month, NHSRCL was entrusted by the Ministry of Railways to prepare detailed project reports (DPRs) for seven new high-speed rail corridors in the country. These include Delhi-Varanasi (865 km), Mumbai-Nagpur (741 km), Delhi-Ahmedabad (886 km), Chennai-Mysore (435 km), Delhi-Amritsar (459 km), Mumbai-Hyderabad (711 km) and Varanasi-Howrah (760 km). The length of the corridors is tentative and is likely to be revised once the surveys are completed. The tender for the preparation of DPR for the Mumbai-Nasik-Nagpur corridor was floated on September 8. This would involve survey, identification of overhead and overground utilities and identification of power sourcing options for substations along the proposed Mumbai-Nasik-Nagpur high-speed rail corridor. NHSRCL had released tenders related to data collection for the preparation of DPR for Delhi-Jaipur-Udaipur-Ahmedabad and Delhi-Lucknow-Varanasi corridors recently.