China-based STECL bags RRTS tunnel contract

Chinese tunnel engineering giant, Shanghai Tunnel Engineering Company Limited (STECL) has been awarded the contract for the construction of a 5.6-km long New Ashok Nagar to Sahibabad underground stretch of the Delhi-Meerut RRTS corridor. National Capital Region Transport Corporation (NCRTC), which is executing the country's first Regional Rapid Rail Transit System (RRTS), informed that the contract has been awarded following the set procedure and guidelines. Approvals have to be taken at various levels for bids that are funded by multilateral agencies. Now, all the civil work tenders of the 82-km-long Delhi-Ghaziabad-Meerut corridor have been awarded and the construction is going on in full swing to commission the project in time. A controversy had erupted in June last year after the STEC emerged as the lowest bidder for the construction of the 5.6-km tunnel on one of the stretches of the Delhi-Meerut RRTS project amid a standoff between India and China along the LAC in Ladakh.

The 82-km-long Delhi-Ghaziabad-Meerut RRTS corridor is being funded by the Asian Development Bank (ADB). According to their procurement guidelines, vendors from all member countries of the bank are eligible to participate in the bidding process without any discrimination. The NCRTC had invited bids for the construction of the tunnel on November 9, 2019, for which five companies had submitted technical bids and all the five bidders qualified in the technical bid evaluation but Shanghai Tunnel Engineering Company Limited had emerged as the L1 bidder for the tender after qualifying on all the parameters and hence the contract was awarded to it.