As many as eight infrastructure companies have evinced interest in bidding for the Mumbai elevated rail corridor project after Indian Railways revised the terms for it.

The elevated suburban rail corridor of 63.27 km between Oval Maidan-Churchgate-Virar being developed by Mumbai Railway Vikas Corporation on PPP mode, is estimated to cost Rs 22,500 crore.

The eight companies - Reliance Infrastructure; Gammon India; Larsen & Toubro (L&T); Infrastructure Leasing and Financial Services (IL&FS); GMR Infrastructure; Construcciones y Auxiliar de Ferrocarriles (CAF); Siemens AG; and Tata Realty and Infrastructure have purchased RfQ documents for the project. The Railways is likely to postpone the closing date for accepting the RfQs.

The revised RfQ document offers sops such as higher government financing support by proposing to raise the viability gap funding cap to 40 per cent of the project cost from the earlier 20 per cent, subject to the Finance Ministry's approval, debt financing by state-run Indian Railway Finance Corp and India Infrastructure Finance Co, and providing 12 plots of railway land for commercial use by the selected developer. Technical changes include decreasing the length of the trains from 12-15 cars to eight, and adopting standard gauge instead of broad gauge.

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