Bullet train: L&T wins Rs 25,000-cr order for Gujarat stretch

Mumbai: Engineering major Larsen and Toubro on Wednesday said it has won a Rs 25,000-crore order from the government to execute a portion of the ambitious Mumbai-Ahmedabad bullet train project.
"We have won our biggest-ever and the most prestigious of contracts in our long history from the government a few hours back today. This Rs 25,000-crore order is the single largest for us and also the single largest contract the government has awarded so far," S N Subrahmanyan, chief executive and managing director of L&T, told reporters during the earnings call this evening.

He said the order mandates them to complete the project in four years.

"We are confident of our ability to meet the deadline and complete the project on time. And we will complete it to the full satisfaction of our client," he added without sharing more details.

On September 24, the National High Speed Rail Corporation had opened the bids for the nearly Rs 1.08 lakh crore Ahmedabad-Mumbai bullet train project covering the Gujarat stretch of it, with seven bidders qualifying for the 508-km-long project. The trail will connect the two cities in under 2 hours.

This tender covers nearly 47 per cent of total alignment of the corridor between Vapi and Vadodara in Gujarat and includes four stations — Surat, Vapi, Billimora and Bharuch — as well as 24 rivers and as 30 road-crossings.

The contract is about design and construction of the 237-km long line and the entire section falls in Gujarat. The current Maharashtra government is not keen on the project and has not begun land acquisition.

L&T won the contract outbidding Tata Projects, Ircon International–Afcons Infrastructure–JMC Projects consortium, and J Kumar Infra Projects–NCC-HSR consortium.

The ambitious project is being developed on Japanese E5 Shinkansen technology. Prime Minister Narendra Modi had laid the foundation stone of the project in September 2017 along with then Japanese premier Shinzo Abe.

This project is expected to generate over 90,000 direct and indirect jobs during the construction period.

The national transporter has also sanctioned feasibility studies for seven more high-speed rails on the Delhi-Amritsar, Varanasi-Howrah, Delhi-Varanasi, Delhi-Ahmedabad, Mumbai-Hyderabad, Mumbai-Nagpur, Chennai-Mysore.