The Maharashtra government has now decided to make the monorail project part of the much-delayed Rs 7,000 crore Mumbai Trans-Harbour Link (MTHL) connecting the proposed new airport at Navi Mumbai and the Sahar airport. However, the state government officials claim the move will not delay the project further.
The 22 km sea link, which will connect Sewari on the island city and Nava-Sheva across the creek, has been delayed by two to three years due to protests by fishermen community, litigation over the environmental issues and subsequently due to the race between Ambani brothers to grab the project.
Unable to resolve the deadlock between the Ambani brothers, the state government decided not to undertake the project on build-own- transfer (BOT) basis and execute it by giving out engineering procurement and construction (EPC) contracts.
A senior official from the state governnment’s urban development ministry said, “The Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation (MSRDC), a nodal agency for the MTHL, has been asked to make the change in the design of the sea link to accommodate monorail, which will connect both the airports.”
“At this stage, there is no immediate plan to call bids for the monorail project. We just want to ensure that while we are constructing MTHL, it should be able to accommodate monorail in the future, whenever a decision to link both the airports by monorail is taken. So, at this stage, it will not be possible to guess what will be the cost of the monorail project,” he clarified.
Claiming that only few modifications would be required in the present design of MTHL, he said the project would not get delayed because of inclusion of monorail in it. “MSRDC has been asked to go ahead with the tendering process and we are confident that we will keep the deadline of January 26 for the ‘bhoomi poojan’, set by Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh,” he said.