New Delhi (Metro Rail News): According to railway board chairman VK Yadav, One section of the Ahmedabad-Mumbai high-speed rail corridor is likely to be tendered out within three months after nearly 90% of the land acquisition for the project is completed.
Indian Railways has so far completed 76% of land acquisition in Gujarat and 24% in Maharashtra; overall 60% of land acquisition for the ambitious Bullet Train project has been completed, Yadav was quoted saying by a newspaper.
“In any mega project, the first thing we do is land acquisition and then we finalise the alignment. We have completed the alignment and designs. As on date, we have acquired 60% of the land…Due to Covid situation there was some slowdown in land acquisition, but it has started picking up now and we are sure over the coming six months, most of the land will be acquired,” he told to the newspaper.
Railways expect the high-speed rail corridor to be complete on time despite the Covid-19 outbreak. The project connecting Mumbai and Ahmedabad is supposed to be operational by December 2023.
The project has had to contend with issues ranging from protests by landowners to rising costs because of a widening gap between the Indian rupee and the Japanese yen; 80% of the Rs 1 trillion needed to fund the project will come from a 20-year Japan International Cooperation Agency (Jica) loan.
The project implementing agency National High-Speed Rail Corporation (NHSRCL), has also begun floating tenders for related civil works.The national transporter has begun feasibility studies on seven other potential high-speed corridors to gauge their financial viability and estimated traffic they will attract. Yadav said Indian Railways was exploring whether the corridors would be viable to run high-speed Bullet Trains with speeds above 300 kmph.
The seven proposed corridors are Delhi -Varanasi, Varanasi- Howrah, Delhi – Ahmedabad, Mumbai– Nagpur, Mumbai – Hyderabad, Chennai – Mysore and Delhi –Amritsar.
