The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has awarded Afcons Infrastructure Ltd. a contract worth approximately $200 million to design and build a deep-water conveyance tunnel that will carry water from a planned seawater desalination plant into Mumbai’s distribution network, according to Engineering News-Record.
The tunnel will connect a desalination plant planned for Manori, on Mumbai’s northwest coast, to the city’s water system at Charkop, near Mahavir Nagar. The route will run roughly 420 feet below the surface, well beneath the congested urban infrastructure above.
Under the design-build contract, Afcons has 45 months to complete the tunnel. The desalination plant it will serve is being designed for an initial capacity of 53 million gallons a day, with provision to eventually expand to 106 million gallons a day as demand grows.
The project is part of a broader push by Mumbai authorities to diversify the city’s water supply. Mumbai, home to roughly 12.5 million residents, currently faces a water supply shortfall estimated at around 15%, driven by population growth and the limits of the city’s traditional reservoir-fed system. Once operational, the Manori plant is expected to supply close to 10% of Mumbai’s total water needs, easing pressure on the reservoirs the city has long relied on during dry seasons.
Deep tunnels of this kind are increasingly used in dense coastal cities to move desalinated water inland without disrupting surface infrastructure or requiring extensive land acquisition along the route. The approach mirrors conveyance strategies used in other major desalination schemes worldwide, where getting treated water from a coastal plant to inland distribution points is often as complex an engineering challenge as treatment itself.
Afcons, one of India’s largest infrastructure contractors, has a track record in large tunneling and marine works. The Manori award adds to a growing pipeline of desalination-linked infrastructure work in India, as coastal cities look to seawater as a hedge against increasingly unpredictable monsoon patterns and groundwater depletion.
(Source: Engineering News-Record)