Minister of state for railways Manoj Sinha on Wednesday informed the Lok Sabha that 81% of the project cost for the Mumbai-Ahmedabad high-speed corridor will be met through the STEP loan offered by the government of Japan. He said the contract to undertake a feasibility study for the other three identified high-speed corridors has been awarded to various consortia.
These projects are part of the railways’ plan to introduce high-speed corridors connecting the ‘Golden Quadrilateral’ spanning over 10,000 km that will connect Delhi, Chennai, Mumbai and Kolkata. The feasibility study for the Delhi-Mumbai corridor has been awarded to consortium with China-based Third Railway Survey and Design Institute Group Corporation as a lead partner and India-based Lahmeyer International.
The study for the Mumbai-Chennai corridor has been awarded to a consortium with France-based SYSTRA as a lead partner and RITES-Ernest and Young LLP as other partners. Consortia lead by Spain-based INECO, TYPSA & Intercontinental Consultants & Technocrats Pvt. Ltd have been awarded the contract to undertake a study on the Kolkata-Delhi corridor. The feasibility for the Delhi-Nagpur section part of the Delhi-Chennai high-speed corridor is being done through government-to-government co-operation with the China.
The 505-km Mumbai-Ahmedabad bullet train project is estimated to cost a whopping R98,000 crore and is supposed to cut down the travel time from the present seven hours to two hours after its completion. The national transporter, in co-ordination with Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), submitted its feasibility report for the Mumbai-Ahmedabad corridor in July this year.
Sources in the government state that the feasibility report has been forwarded to the ‘Empowered Committee for Innovative Collaborations’ headed by NITI Aayog vice-chairman Arvind Panagariya.