Mumbai: Coastal Road inches ahead, 1 km tunnel bored

Work on Coastal Road going on at Marine Drive on Saturday. Pic/Shadab Khan

The Coastal Road project has reached a tiny milestone, as the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has completed the tunneling work of about 1 km on one of the two planned tunnels. This has come after 8 months, which means the tunnel boring machine - named Mavala - has bored upto almost five metres every day since January when the work commenced. The completion of this tunnel is scheduled by January 2022.

The project worth Rs 12,000 crore, includes reclamation of the sea and construction of a sea wall and two underwater tunnels. After the completion of one tunnel, the tunnel boring machine will take at least another two to three months to be dismantled and re-assembled and brought back to the Priyadarshini Park work site, for the second tunnel. Initial plans to do this were early next year, now this will be delayed.

A civic official said, "The completion of the project is scheduled by the end of 2023. The arrival of experts to get the machine moving, and monitoring work was delayed because of the second COVID-19 wave. We were expecting one tunnel to be completed by October and to start work on the next one by January or February, but the deadlines are now pushed to January and April."

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