Mumbai: The Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) is looking for an agency for the deployment of sniffer dogs for its Mumbai Monorail.
Bapu Pawar, Joint Metropolitan Commissioner, MMRDA, said, "We require 20 sniffer dogs for 17 monorail stations and one at the depot. Like other public transport services – Railways and Metros – which have sniffer dog squads, we too have called tender to induct sniffer dogs for the monorail."
Reportedly, after terminating the contract with Malaysian-based company SCOMI Engineering, the MMRDA has been taking care of the operations and maintenance (O&M) of the monorail that runs between Jacob Circle and Chembur, which was made fully operational in 2019. According to the MMRDA, the estimated cost of the project is about Rs 1.69 cr for two years.
Besides this, MMRDA has also floated tender inviting agencies for sanitisaton of monorail trains. Agencies that have prior experience of carrying out santisation of government offices/Central govt/ public sector undertakings such as Airport Authority of India/state government can participate. The estimated cost of this work is Rs 48.32 lakh for three months.
The MMRDA has extended the newly issued tender deadline for submission of bids for the monorail procurement to November 3 from October 5. It had issued tender for manufacture, supply and commissioning of ten new monorail rakes of four coaches each in August 2020 and the last date for the bid submission was on October 5. However, as per the newly revised dateline, the bid submission has been extended by one more month now. The fresh tender of the 10 new monorail procurement is of Rs 545 crore.
Earlier too, in June, the MMRDA had cancelled the year-long-old bidding process of monorail procurement costing Rs 500, in which the two Chinese companies had shown interest. The decision was also taken in the backdrop of the violent face-off between India and China at Galwan Valley.
According to the MMRDA, both Chinese companies were asking for revision in terms and conditions following which the process was scrapped. Later it announced that dialogue has been initiated with Indian manufacturing companies to provide monorail rakes.
