Three shortlisted companies, namely, GMR Infrastructure, Tata Realty & Infrastructure, and the Hiranandani Group have opted out of the financial bids for constructing Navi Mumbai airport.

At present GVK Power & Infrastructure-led Mumbai International Airport is the only qualified bidder for the project.

The estimated cost of the project is Rs 16,000 crore. The companies opted out of the project citing various issues such as stipulated time of 42 months to complete the project not being enough, incomplete resettlement of families from the area, issues related to the bid document.

GMR noted that pre-development work had not yet started, and half of the contracts for the pre-development work had not yet been awarded.

The cost of the project has highly escalated in the past several years. In addition, the project has not yet received Stage-II clearance from the environment ministry.