Well, the title aptly suits the NHAI which comes out with creative bidding guidelines for its BOOT projects. World over, as the project development companies try to bring more objectivity into their bidding documents and guidelines, NHAI seems to go otherwise. The recently issued bidding requirement for the project undertaking agency to share a proportion of profits ( and the way as mentioend in the model concession agreement) with NHAI is the most absurdest thing possible for a road construction project. The creativity doesn't end here. They intend to make the project company pay higher share of revenue incase of the actual traffic is higher than the projected. In case, the actual traffic is lower than the projected, it may lead to increase in lease period. Probably, NHAI may consider this the balancing act, and I term it 'a grotesque debacle in the making'. My friends at NHAI have 'correctly identified' ( as if they didn't knew it earlier) that the major obstacle was getting land buyouts for the project. So, they opted to lower the ceiling of land requirement before issuing 'notice to proceed' from 80 % to 60 %. Probably, they want to postpone facing the known devil to a bit later stage and make the executing agency incur irrecoverable costs till then.
Was that Monteksingh Ahluwalia shouting ' public private partnership ' ? 'F.O.' is gonna be the reply of private construction companies. Hope the real Dr. Singh roars soon ....!!!!
1 comment:
Well written Utpal. There will be lot of opposition from the bidders in the subsequent contracts finalization
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