📋 Tender Overview
Project Location : Maharashtra
Project Description: Thane-Borivali tunnel project, this project of the Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation (MSRDC) received a nod. The 6-lane twin tunnel (3 lanes in each direction) will enable vehicles to zip at 80-kmph and slash the travel time, from the current 60 minutes to barely 15 minutes, between Borivali on the Western Express Highway to Thane, besides decongesting the Ghodbunder Road. The twin tunnel will run underneath the lush green SGNP for which the MSRDC is taking special precautions to avoid causing harm to its biodiversity or its flora and fauna, which includes leopards, spotted deer, Sambar, civets, different types of monkeys, Indian flying fox, pythons and other snakes, big and small reptiles including crocodiles, birds, insects, thousands of plant species, etc. For this, the MSRDC will deploy Tunnel Boring Machines (TBMs) - similar to the ones deployed for digging the underground sections of Mumbai Metro projects - to cause minimum disturbances to wildlife in the 87-square km SGNP.
On April 2023, Larsen & Toubro (L&T) and Megha Engineering & Infrastructures (MEIL) have emerged as the lowest bidders (L1) for a package each, of the 11.84 km Thane–Borivali twin tunnel project in Mumbai.
The road project by Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) will feature 2x10.8 km of road tunnels under Sanjay Gandhi National Park (SGNP), and a combined one km of approach roads at both ends. Package II involves the design and construction of 6.09-km-long Thane side twin tube road tunnel. Under Package-I, the scope includes design and construction of 5.75 km-long twin tube road tunnel, Borivali side.
The tunnels with three lanes each will be built using four mega tunnel boring machines (TBMs) at a maximum depth of 23 mtrs. below the surface, and connect Magathane’s Ekta Nagar in Borivali and Tikuji-ni-Wadi at Manpada in Thane.
The total estimated cost of the project is Rs 13,200 crore. The project will reduce the driving time between both ends to just about 15 minutes from the current 1.5 hours. MMRDA has received wildlife clearance from the National Board for Wildlife, while environmental clearance (EC) for diverting 57.02 hectares of forest area is awaited.
The first inter-district road tunnel project in the state, it will entail acquiring 16.54 hectares private and 40.46 hectare of SGNP lands and will connect Borivali WEH in Mumbai with the Tikuji-ni-Wadi on the Thane side.
The project will have cross-tunnels every 300 metres, drainage systems, smoke detector, and jet fand to keep the air clean and fresh, will result in fuel savings of over a million lakh tonnes and reduce emissions by 36 per cent.
On October 2017, The six lane tunnelling work proposed in 2015 which will connect Tikuji-ni-Wadi in Thane to Western Express Highway at Borivali will take another six months to start. The Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation (MSRDC) has yet to obtain approval from
