Indian Builder L&T Wins Up to $1 Billion in Dhaka Metro Contracts as Bangladesh's Tk58,478 Crore Rail Push Takes Shape

Larsen & Toubro, the Indian engineering and construction conglomerate, has won two contract packages worth up to $1 billion combined for Dhaka's first underground metro line, the company disclosed in a filing to the Indian stock exchanges. The ceiling figure covers track works, electrical systems, signalling, telecommunications, and platform screen doors on MRT Line 1, a roughly 31 kilometre corridor that will carry Dhaka's first underground trains. The win is part of a much larger Tk58,478 crore construction push the government approved at the start of October, spread across eight packages and contractors from four countries.

• L&T's two packages for MRT Line 1, taken from the government's own approval figures, are worth a combined Tk17,512 crore, consistent with the "up to $1 billion" ceiling the company disclosed.
• The Cabinet Committee on Government Purchase approved eight construction packages worth Tk58,478 crore in total for MRT Line 1 and MRT Line 5 Northern Route on October 1.
• MRT Line 1 will be Bangladesh's first underground metro, running from the airport to Kamalapur underground, then elevated out to Purbachal.
• Japan's JICA is financing the projects, and contractors from Japan, China, and Bangladesh share the remaining packages alongside L&T.

What L&T actually won

According to the government's own procurement breakdown, L&T secured two of the eight approved packages. One, package CP-09, covers track works and electrical facilities as part of a consortium with Sumitomo, valued at Tk11,065.58 crore. The other, CP-10, covers signalling, telecommunications, platform screen doors, and enterprise resource management, valued at Tk6,446.65 crore and awarded to L&T alone. Added together, those two packages come to roughly Tk17,512 crore, which at prevailing exchange rates lines up with the "up to $1 billion" ceiling L&T reported to its own shareholders. L&T's filing frames the award as a "major" order under its internal reporting bands, and the company already has a track record on this line of business in Dhaka: it previously delivered the integrated railway systems package for Dhaka Metro Line 6, the capital's first operating metro corridor.

The full Tk58,478 crore picture

L&T's win is one slice of a much bigger construction programme. The Cabinet Committee on Government Purchase approved all eight packages on October 1, covering both MRT Line 1 and MRT Line 5 Northern Route. MRT Line 1's six packages alone add up to Tk53,959.23 crore, the largest of which, a Tk18,037.26 crore package for the main line and stations between Rampura and Notun Bazar, went to a Tokyu-MIL joint venture. Other packages went to Chinese and Bangladeshi joint ventures, including CREC-MIL-MBEC and SINOHYDRO-SEBCL. MRT Line 5 Northern Route, a 20 kilometre line running from Hemayetpur in Savar to Vatara, accounts for the remaining Tk4,518.51 crore across two packages.

Package	Scope	Contractor	Value (Tk crore)
MRT-1 CP-04	Main line, Rampura to Notun Bazar	Tokyu-MIL JV	18,037.26
MRT-1 CP-06	Main line, Nadda to Airport Station	Nishimatsu-TPL-Toda JV	11,590.58
MRT-1 CP-09	Track and electrical works	L&T-Sumitomo Consortium	11,065.58
MRT-1 CP-10	Signalling and telecoms	Larsen & Toubro	6,446.65
MRT-1 CP-02	Depot civil works	Sinohydro-SEBCL JV	4,285.07
MRT-1 CP-07	Balu River transition section	CREC-MIL-MBEC JV	2,534.09
MRT-5 CP-03	Elevated line and stations	CREC-MIL-MBEC JV	2,670.99
MRT-5 CP-02	Hemayetpur depot	CPC-Hanil JV	1,847.52

Why Japan is footing much of the bill

Neither MRT Line 1 nor MRT Line 5 Northern Route is being built on Bangladesh's own balance sheet alone. The Japan International Cooperation Agency is financing the projects, continuing a pattern that began with Dhaka's first metro line, MRT Line 6, which also leaned heavily on Japanese concessional loans. For a government already juggling a widening debt service bill elsewhere in the budget, as this publication has reported in coverage of Bangladesh's rising external debt payments, project loans of this kind are attractive precisely because they are earmarked for specific, revenue generating infrastructure rather than general budget support, and they typically carry far softer terms than market borrowing.

What it means for commuters, contractors, and the construction economy

For ordinary residents of Dhaka, the practical payoff is years away. MRT Line 1 is still at the contracting stage, with 19 planned stations and a depot at Pitalganj, and the government's own documents give no firm completion date. For the construction and engineering sector, though, the signal is more immediate: a Tk58,478 crore programme spread across Indian, Japanese, Chinese, and Bangladeshi firms means sustained demand for steel, cement, skilled labour, and local subcontracting work for years to come, at a time when the broader economy has been short of exactly that kind of large scale, foreign financed investment. For currency watchers, large foreign financed infrastructure spending also means a steady drawdown of project loans and a corresponding need for taka to pay local contractors and suppliers, one more variable for anyone tracking the exchange rate alongside Bangladesh's currency converter tools. Whether L&T's roughly Tk17,500 crore slice of the programme gets delivered on the timeline the government hopes for will say a lot about whether Dhaka's second and third metro lines fare better than the long, often delayed build out of the first.