Vadhvan Port Project Ltd (VPPL) has again extended the deadline to submit bids for the construction of the port project's offshore bund under a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) in the Hybrid Annuity Mode (HAM).
This comes after DP World Ltd and a joint venture between Royal Boskalis B.V. and NMDC Dredging & Marine placed bids for the ₹22,323.47 crore offshore project—the biggest component among others in the overall port project.
VPPL has now pushed the deadline to 3 PM on September 23 just hours after the expiry of the already extended deadline of September 17—a move termed as "unusual" in an ET Infra report, citing an industry source.
This extension comes despite the VPPL rejecting requests—from potential bidders who had sought more time—as recently as September 14.
Notably, a consortium comprising Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone (APSEZ), Van Oord, Jan De Nul, and ISDPL (DEME Group) had teamed up to place a bid for this offshore contract, but could not make the deadline due to a "technical difficulty", the report noted, citing a source in the know.
“The extension was done for more participation especially for a work of this size,” said Ravish Kumar Singh, Deputy Chairman, Jawaharlal Nehru Port Authority (JNPA), which is one part of the VPPL—a special purpose vehicle (SPV) for the construction of the Palghar-based port project—with the Maharashtra Maritime Board (MMB) being the other part with a smaller stake.
The ₹76,220 crore greenfield deep-draft port project, touted as India’s biggest public port, will have a capacity of 298 million metric tonnes (MMT) of cargo per year, of which container cargo throughput is expected to be 23.2 million TEUs.
The September 17 extension is one of many such extensions due to the scale of the offshore component of the port project, which will be constructed in two phases on 1,207 acres of reclaimed land.
Under the HAM model, the work will be implemented on a payment structure in the ratio of 45:55 whereby 45 per cent of the upfront payment will be made by VPPL and 55 per cent by the PPP operator for a concession period of 15 years—five years for construction, and 10 years for operation and maintenance.
Another major extension came in February this year, when the VPPL pushed the tender date to May 18 because of the lengthy statutory process behind acquiring land for rail and road connectivity to the port project.
This is because without the access road, the project site would remain inaccessible—as the existing local roads are too narrow for heavy transportation—rendering the HAM contractor unable to begin work.
What are the other two components of the port project?
The offshore protection bund project is the largest of three components of the Vadhvan Port project.
The second component is a ₹1,648 crore reclamation project to build a port-linked facility, near the shore, which will act as the landing jetty.
The contract for this component was awarded to Cemindia Projects Ltd (formerly ITD Cementation India Ltd) in December 2024.
The third component is a 10.14 km-long breakwater, awarded a few months ago to Afcons Infrastructure Ltd, an infrastructure engineering and construction company under the Shapoorji Pallonji Group. This ₹5,301.25 crore project aims to make this breakwater the longest for any port in India.
