Capital Projects · Procurement

Procuring for a City From Scratch: EPC, Design-Build, and 15+ First-of-Their-Kind Packages

5+ years running procurement, contracts, and roughly INR 1,200 crore a year of capital budget for infrastructure India had never built: utility tunnels, an automated waste collection system, district cooling plants, a power substation with PPA, and a Tier-4 data center and city command center.

Role
Manager, Contracts
Client
GIFT City Co. Ltd (GIFTCL / GIFT SEZ)
Period
2012 – 2018
Location
Gandhinagar, Gujarat

The challenge

GIFT City was India's first attempt at building a smart city from scratch: a greenfield international financial services hub with district-scale infrastructure that had no domestic procurement precedent. Every contract, from utility tunnels to automated waste collection, had to be structured, tendered, and administered for technology India had never bought before.

My role and approach

Joining at 25 and rising from Assistant Manager to Manager of Contracts, I ran the procurement lifecycle for the city's core infrastructure:

  • Utility tunnels (including the 4.5 km Phase II), arterial roads, and multiple buildings on design-build and EPC contracts
  • The automated solid waste collection system, plasma pyrolysis plant, water and sewage treatment plants, district cooling plants with thermal energy storage (TES) tanks, and the 66/33kV substation and distribution network, plus power purchase agreements, energy storage, and solar power
  • The Meet Me Room, C4 City Command & Control Center, and Tier 4 data center, plus SAP S/4 HANA cloud ERP system integrator selection
  • Macro and micro budgeting with monthly cash-flow forecasting, on roughly INR 1,200 crore (~US$141 million)* of annual budget
  • Technical audit of bidding processes and executed contracts across the city's works

The impact

Across five years I delivered a $200M+ capital portfolio with zero cost overruns, zero disputes, and zero litigation losses across 500+ contracts. The contracts and procurement frameworks built in those years underpin infrastructure now serving one of India's most ambitious urban projects. This is where my procurement rigor was forged: term sheets, legal vetting, bid process management, claims, and contract closure, done end to end, dozens of times, on first-of-their-kind projects. Even today, the procurement processes, standard bidding documents (SBDs), and templates I created continue to shape procurement outcomes for GIFT City.

* USD figures are indicative conversions at ₹85 = US$1.

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