No bidders yet for proposed Mumbai-Nagpur super communication highway

Mumbai city news: On Wednesday, the MSRDC extended the last date to submit civil construction bids for the expressway.

Five months after global bids for the civil construction of the proposed Mumbai-Nagpur Expressway were floated, the Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation (MSRDC) has still not received any bids. The MSRDC had invited a request for qualification (RFQ) in January, but later scrapped it and issued fresh bids with new conditions in March.

The last date to submit the bids is June 5. (Picture for representation)

On Wednesday, the MSRDC extended the last date to submit civil construction bids for the expressway. It said that there were some technical glitches, because of which the companies could not submit bids. The last date to submit the bids is June 5. “There was a technical glitch with the payment gateway, so the bidders could carry out online transactions and submit bids online. We extended the date till June 5,” said Kiran Kurundkar, joint managing director, MSRDC. He added that some bidders submitted physical bids, but they could not be opened as it was an online process.

However, sources said that the response was poor as companies wanted certain conditions in the reissued RFQ to be removed. The Corporation had added conditions — companies must have experience of constructing access-controlled expressways or freeways. The reissued RFQ document also stipulated disqualification of companies under corporate debt restructuring (CDR) or strategic debt restructuring (SDR), which has been opposed by several interested companies.

“Many companies have told us to remove the CDR, SDR and alleged that such stipulations are tailor-made for select construction companies, but we cannot scrap tendering midway. We will see the response, and if it is poor, we will change the conditions,” said a senior MSRDC official.

The expressway will link Mumbai with Nagpur, with an eight-lane access controlled road like the Mumbai-Pune Expressway. It will not only cut travel time between the two cities, but state government officials said it will also become a game-changer for the state.