Mumbai: Work on the Mumbai-Ahmedabad high-speed rail corridor project will start by late 2017 or early 2018 and will be completed in five years. This is what railway board chairman A K Mittal said at the Make In India Week on Sunday evening.

The Mumbai-Ahmedabad high speed corridor project is one of the ambitious projects promised by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government and is on the priority list.

Addressing a press conference after the first joint meeting, Mittal said that Japan International Cooperation Agency will fund 81% of the project cost of Rs 98,000 crore as a soft loan with a 50-year term, a moratorium of 15 years with an interest rate of 0.1%.

Mittal said that the railways wanted an underground station for this project at BKC, which the state government had cited in the past, that they would like to give the land for a proposed finance centre at BKC rather than the station. He said that even though the state government decides to build a finance centre at BKC, the station for the bullet train could still be built there.

“The station will be three- storeyed underground and would not hamper the building of the finance centre. Building an underground station for the bullet train will result in increasing prices of land near this station,” said Mittal, adding that a fresh round of talks will be held with the government to discuss this issue.

State government officials said that work on land acquisition and compensation package will be done before 2017-end.

The proposed stations include BKC, Thane, Virar, Surat, Bharuch and Vadodara on the Mumbai-Ahmedabad section, covering nearly 500 km.

There will be a Special Purpose Vehicle for the speedy implementation of the project. If implemented, the journey time between Mumbai and Ahmedabad could be 3 hours in future, sources added.



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