Tenders for B’lore high-speed rail link in 3 mths

Tenders for B’lore high-speed rail link in 3 mths

Jaishankar Jayaramiah

Bangalore: The government-owned Karnataka State Industrial Investment Development Corporation (KSIIDC) is likely to float tenders in the next three months towards a Rs 5,767 crore high speed rail link (HSRL) project, which will connect Bangalore city with Bangalore international airport (BIA).

Thus far 27 companies including railway infrastructure majors Bombardier, Siemens, Alastom and L&T have expressed their interest in the project. “They have all participated in the pre-bid meeting conducted by us recently,” said V Madhu, principal secretary of the department of infrastructure, Karnataka. Madhu said the companies have been asked to submit their request for qualification (RFQ) documents on August 8. “We hope all 27 companies will submit RFQs,” he added. The bidders will be short-listed in a months’ time and the final tender is expected to be floated by September while the work order is likely to be awarded to the successful bidder by January-February 2010, he told FE on the sidelines of an infrastructure seminar organised by Ficci.

Excluding cost of government land, the project cost, as per June 2007 estimation stood at Rs 4,313 crore but this estimation has been increased to Rs 5,767 crore, KSIIDC informed the participating companies in a recently held pre-application conference. The key technical and operational parameters of the project include a fully elevated high-speed line. The semantics also involve a single column carrying both the tracks located in the median of road. The maximum speed limit of a train plying on a high-speed track will be 160 kmph (km per hour), the maximum operating speed however is 145 kmph and the commercial speed of the train is 85 kmph. Initially the HSRL will have 10 trains and each train will have six coaches. To start with, train frequency will be every 10 minutes. This will later be reduced step-by-step to eight minutes, six minutes and three minutes.

The length of the HSRL is about 34 km from Bangalore city to BIA and will be implemented on a ‘built, operate and transfer’ (BOT) basis. The time line for transferring the project to the government was fixed at 30 years (including construction period). Additionally, the Karnataka government has appointed Delhi metro rail corporation ltd (DMRCL) as the consultant / project advisor for HSRL project. Currently the primary connectivity to BIA is through NH-7, which is a divided dual carriageway with three lanes in each direction. NH-7 is a busy highway also connecting Bangalore to Hyderabad. The traffic volume on this road was registered at around 50,000 vehicles (each way) every day, with peak hour traffic being about 5,000 vehicles per hour each way. This along with recent reports on air traffic justifies the HSRL. Air traffic is forecasted to be 17.2 million passengers per annum in 2010-11, 40.1 million in 2021-22 and 50.20 million in 2025-26. The air travellers’ traffic in the new Bangalore international airport on a per day basis, will increase from 52,876 in 2011-12 to 1,09,863 in 2021-22 and 1,37,534 in 2025-26. As per the rider-ship forecast about 40% of this figure will be using the HSRL. The proposed HSRL will reduce travelling time from BIA to Bangalore city to 25 minutes from the current time taken by road of 70-100 minutes.