43 road and bridge construction contracts under the Department of Roads that had been pending for years have been terminated.
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Minister for Energy, Water Resources and Irrigation, Physical Infrastructure, Transport and Urban Development Kulman Ghising has directed to immediately start a new tender process to ensure the construction of roads whose contracts have been terminated.
At the meeting of the Ministry of Physical Infrastructure and Transport's first-quarter progress review and ministerial-level development problem resolution committee for the current fiscal year 2082/83 held on Friday, Minister Ghising said that a new tender process should be immediately taken forward after measuring the remaining work of the canceled contracts and evaluating the budget required to complete the construction.
43 contracts for the construction of roads and bridges that had been abandoned for years after taking contracts under the Roads Department have been canceled. The total amount is 2.97 billion 7.9 billion rupees. Minister Ghising said that there are no problems at present as the resources for the canceled projects have already been managed and that necessary facilitation will be provided to the Ministry of Finance if problems are found. He said that the confusion seen in the multi-year agreement on bridge construction will be removed.
'There have been many problems in bridge construction in the Terai-Madhesh, many bridges are abandoned, but with a certain budget for roads, the same amount of work can be done,' Ghising said, 'but it is not possible to do that with bridges. Therefore, we should go for a multi-year process.' He emphasized that the progress of the bodies under the Ministry of Physical Infrastructure and Transport was seen to be low in the first quarter of the current fiscal year and that this should be improved in the coming months.
'Budget freeze may be one reason, but even projects implemented with foreign aid, which do not have budget problems, are progressing slowly,' he said. 'It is necessary to improve the construction progress by solving the problems seen, let us all take the initiative in this.' Stating that the quarterly progress was not encouraging, the Secretary of the Ministry, Keshav Kumar Sharma, said that the management process should be taken forward immediately without leaving the projects whose contracts were terminated in limbo.
In the current fiscal year, an amount of Rs 151.75 billion has been allocated for the bodies under the Ministry of Physical Infrastructure and Transport. Of this, Rs 48.52 billion has been allocated for the first quarter and only Rs 11.64 billion of the allocated amount has been spent.
