Adani Enterprises has engaged Austria-headquartered BERNARD Gruppe to provide advisory services for ropeway projects in India, a senior official told Infralogic.

The collaboration is focused on technical advisory, said Mrigank Shekhar, director at BERNARD Consultants, the Indian subsidiary of BERNARD Gruppe.

The group’s Indian arm has partnered with Adani to support a few bids, said Shekhar, adding that BERNARD Consultants began exploring opportunities to work with concessionaires earlier this year after the government awarded several ropeway projects.

In April, Adani was the highest bidder for an estimated USD 448m, 12.9km ropeway project between Sonprayag and Kedarnath in Uttarakhand state.

Before the engagement with Adani, BERNARD Gruppe was retained by the central procurement agency, National Highways and Logistics Management Limited (NHLML), to conduct feasibility and pre-feasibility studies for potential ropeway projects.

The agency then selected those that were found to be viable and called for bids to develop the projects for which feasibility assessments were complete.

Some of these on which BERNARD Gruppe contributed to at the feasibility stage include the first phase of the Varanasi ropeway; Bijli Mahadev project at Kullu in Himachal Pradesh state Dhosi Hills and the Shankaracharya ropeway, all of which have been awarded, Shekhar said.

The approximately 4km Varanasi ropeway project was awarded in December 2022 to Vishwa Samudra Engineering, in partnership with Switzerland-based ropeway technology firm Bartholet Maschinenbau.

In April this year, NHLML invited bids from consultants to prepare detailed reports for about 50 ropeway systems following pre-feasibility studies of more than 100 potential projects. The proposals for many of these are due this month and the next.

The first 50 projects are planned to be tendered for development in the build, operate, transfer model based on the delivery of the project reports.

BERNARD Gruppe offers engineering services in sectors including energy, industry, infrastructure and mobility. These relate to technical and financial assessments, as well as consultancy for all phases of design and project implementation, according to its website.

The Indian government introduced a national ropeways program in 2022 following a study by global consulting firm Mckinsey, which identified seven hilly states for the initial projects.