The Gautam Adani-owned Adani Group has shown interest in operating the trouble-making 19-km-long Mumbai Monorail corridor between Chembur and Jacob Circle (Mahalaxmi), officials from the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) confirmed. UPS Madan, Metropolitan Commissioner, MMRDA confirmed that Adani Group has written to MMRDA, expressing interest in operating the Monorail. According MMRDA officials, the Adani Group last week officially wrote to it, expressing its interest for being the operations and maintenance contractor of the Monorail corridor. The MMRDA is currently looking for a new operator for running the Monorail corridor that has been in news since inception in 2014, for several technical glitches along with it the incident of an empty coach of Monorail catching fire in November, resulting in services of the first phase of the Monorail between Chembur and Wadala being temporarily suspended. While the first phase of Monorail was made operational in 2014, the second phase between Wadala and Jacob Circle is expected to be made operational by March 2018 end. "The Commissioner of Railway Safety inspected the trial run last week. Another trial run is expected in mid March after which we will approach state government for making the whole corridor operational," said a MMRDA official. However, a detailed email query sent to Adani Group over it writing to MMRDA for running Mumbai Monorail didn't yield any response till the time of going to press. Along with the Adani Group, other companies that have shown interest in running the Monorail include Reliance Infrastructure, IL&FS, Singapore-based SMRT Corporation and the current Malaysia-based Scomi Engineering. The last date for submitting the bids for running the Monorail is February 28, and MMRDA has said that there may not be any extensions this time, considering that extension was granted earlier. Madan said: "It is not likely as we have already extended deadline till February 28." Meanwhile, the MMRDA claims to have made the current operator Scomi Engineering ineligible from bidding for the operations of Monorail by putting various conditions on it. MMRDA and Scomi are in arbitration, over cost escalation of the Monorail project. SLOW TRACK

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