GURUGRAM: Gurugram Metro Rail Limited (GMRL) on Monday floated the construction tender for the second phase of the city's own metro, the 14.2 km elevated stretch from Sector 9 to Cyber City, officials said. The package is valued at about Rs 1,662 crore.
Contractors can submit bids between 9 and 18 November, and the winning firm will have 30 months from the award of work to finish the job. The clock starts only when the contract is signed, so the real finish date depends on how fast the bids are evaluated.
The tender covers the viaduct and 13 elevated stations: Sector 7, Sector 4, Sector 5, Ashok Vihar, Sector 3, Bajghera Road, Palam Vihar Extension, Palam Vihar, Sector 23A, Sector 22, Udyog Vihar Phase 4, Udyog Vihar Phase 5 and Cyber City. Platforms are being planned for six-coach trains.
Officials said the station designs have been sized to the peak-hour passenger load expected at each stop, so not every station will look the same. The heaviest loads are expected around the Udyog Vihar industrial belt and at Cyber City, where lakhs of office workers arrive every weekday.
Two stretches will be built as double-decker structures, with a road flyover and the metro viaduct sharing the same columns. One, of about 800 metres, is at Bajghera, and the other, about 1.2 km long, is on Old Delhi Road. Both are spots where traffic already crawls at peak hours and where building a separate flyover later would have meant digging up the same road twice.
Dalimss had reported on 1 October that the state government had cleared the Rs 1,662 crore Phase 2 civil package, which was the last approval GMRL needed before going to the market. Monday's notice is the formal start of that process.
What the old city and Palam Vihar can expect
The Sector 9 to Cyber City arm matters most to the older half of Gurugram. Sectors 3, 4, 5 and 7, Ashok Vihar and Palam Vihar have no metro access today, and residents there depend on autorickshaws, private buses and their own vehicles to reach Cyber City or the Yellow Line at Sikanderpur.
Funding for the stretch is linked to the World Bank. In August a revised loan proposal of about Rs 1,409 crore for the project was cleared, as reported in our story on the World Bank loan for Metro Phase 2.
The first phase, a 15.2 km corridor from Millennium City Centre to Sector 9 along the Old Gurugram side, is already under construction. Officials put its physical progress at about 15 percent. Pier work on that stretch has been moving through Sector 9 and nearby areas, as covered in our report on the first pier cap on the Sector 9 corridor.
Phase 2 has been held up before. The civil tender sat with the state for several months this year, which squeezed the original 2029 target for the full loop from Millennium City Centre to Cyber City. With the tender now open, the timetable depends on how quickly bids are evaluated after 18 November and whether the contract is awarded without fresh rounds.
Sector 9 is the hinge between the two phases. The 14 stations of the first phase and the 13 in this tender together make up a 27-station corridor, planned as one continuous line from Millennium City Centre through the new sectors and the old city to Cyber City, so riders would not have to change trains at Sector 9.
For commuters, the practical change will come later. Construction along Old Delhi Road, Bajghera and the Palam Vihar stretch will mean barricades and narrowed carriageways once work starts. GMRL has not yet issued a traffic management plan for this phase. That is expected after a contractor is on board.
The full tender document, including bid security and eligibility conditions, is available on the Haryana e-procurement portal. GMRL said it would assess bidders on work quality, delivery and their record of sticking to timelines and cost.
