Bombardier Transportation has acquired over 1.40 lakh square feet of area near Savli in South Gujarat, where it will set up a facility for manufacturing and assembling of coaches for Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC). Bombardier Transportation had recently signed a deal for supplying 340 coaches to DMRC.The facility will see an initial investment of Euro 25 million and will directly employ more than 500 people, while providing indirect employment to another 2,000 people.According to sources, DMRC has paid Rs 2,500 crore to Bombardier for the deal, under which the coaches would be delivered between November 2008 and March 2009. The company already has a converter making unit in Makarpura, on the outskirts of Vadodara and an engineering centre in Hyderabad.Sources say that initially DMRC would be getting eight to 10 trains (with four coaches each), which would be manufactured in company's units in Germany and Sweden. After that the remaining coaches would be manufactured in their Hyderabad unit in India.The coaches will have stainless steel bodies, with state of the art propulsion system. The cost of each coach would be around Rs 7.35 crore. Bombardier is one of world's top suppliers of metro coaches. More than 1,400 of its coaches, are used in metro systems of cities like London, New York, Paris and China.Delhi Metro currently has 62 trains that carries more than 3 lakh on a daily basis on its 65 km long network. Under phase II, 118 km of network would be added to the existing one and the metro services would reach Noida and Gurgaon.According to Bombardier officials, their high-capacity vehicles will handle 4 million passengers every day. Also they would help in reducing journey time and ease road traffic congestion in Delhi.
