L&T & Afcons Bid for Chennai Metro’s May Day Park – AG-DMS Section

Larsen & Toubro and Afcons Infrastructure have emerged as the sole bidders for completing the long delayed UAA-02 section of Chennai’s Metro between the May Day Park shaft and AG-DMS station! The Chennai Metro Rail Ltd. had initially invited bids for this critical section in August 2015, but didn’t follow through with awarding the contract to Afcons for “technical reasons“. After that, they invited separate bids for station and tunnel works for which L&T and Afcons have respectively now emerged as the bidders.

This 4.5 km section of the 32.10 km Wimco Nagar – Chennai Airport line starts at the May Day Park shaft, includes 3 stations at Government Estate, LIC, Thousand Lights and finally ends at the AG-DMS shaft. The original contractor of this package, a JV between Gammon-Mosmetrostroy, had abandoned tunneling work in May 2015 after completing only 1835m and 1700m of the 3616m long twin tunnels.

Alignment of UAA-02 between May Day Park & AG-DMS – view Chennai Metro map & information

Packages of Chennai Metro – view Chennai Metro map & information

The Gammon – Mosmetrostroy JV had also abandoned the UAA-03 section between AG-DMS & Saidapet, but luckily tunneling works were almost complete.  Afcons Infra was temporarily roped in to complete the last breakthrough in September 2015 and L&T was tasked with completing the balance civil work at all stations which have been progressing satisfactorily – See: Chennai Metro’s February Newsletter

For UAA-02’s balance works, the CMRL plans to award the 2 contracts in the coming weeks after which work underneath the Anna Salai will resume in May, an entire year after work came to an abrupt end. Both contractors will have 20 months to complete works, so I’m expecting this section to start commercial operations only towards the end of 2018.

For more updates on Chennai’s metro, check out the Chennai section of The Metro Rail Guy!

– TMRG