Bids for Hyderabad Metro to be accepted till April 21

Bids for the Hyderabad Metro Rail (HMRL) project will be accepted till April 21 and the winner will be selected by the end of the month, a top official of HMRL has said.

"We don’t anticipate any problem in executing the project and it will happen as scheduled. The clarifications sought from two bidders have been received. So, all eight consortia will take part in the process," said NVS Reddy, managing director, HMRL, adding the new developer will begin work on the project by the end of the year.

The government had to call for fresh bids after scrapping the agreement signed with the previous consortia led by Maytas Infra following its failure to achieve financial closure in time.

The consortium, which won the bid in 2008, could not complete the financial closure after Satyam Computers faced trouble in the wake of an accounting fraud. Maytas was promoted by sons of Satyam promotor Ramalinga Raju.

The 71-km-long metro rail, the longest in the country, will cost about Rs 12,000 crore. According to Reddy, the developer will be able to earn 80 per cent revenues through passenger traffic. The remaining 20 per cent can be generated by renting out the 18.5-million-sq-ft real estate space alongside.

"As no private land will be acquired, there won’t be any bottlenecks on this count. The city needs a combination of MMTS, metro and bus services," Reddy said.

The consortia qualified to participate in financial bids are Transstroy (OJSC Transstroy (Russia)-CR18G (China)-BEML), Reliance Infra-Reliance Infocomm (ADAG), Lanco Infra-OHL Concessions (Spain), Essar-Leighton (Australia)-Gayatri-VNR, GMR Infra, GVK-Samsung (South Korea), Soma-Strabag AG (Austria) and Larsen & Toubro.