Rosaiah speeding up Metro Rail

Hyderabad, March 02: Chief Minister K Rosaiah today asked the minister and officials of the Municipal Administration and Urban Development (MAUD) to speed up the process of finalisation of awarding the works for Hyderabad Metro Rail project with a firm deadline.

He directed the officials of the Metro Rail Project to monitor every stage of the project and see that the contractors strictly adhere to the milestone and said it was one of the most prestigious projects of the State Government and was very particular to complete it right on schedule.

The officials told the chief minister that financial bids for the project were due in April and the new concessionaire was expected to be in place by May this year. The ground works for the project will be launched in November and most of the sections will be thrown open to public travel in about four years while the total project will be completed in five years.

Reviewing the progress of the project with MAUD Minister Anam Ramanarayan Reddy and officials, the chief minister said that Hyderabad was expanding fast and traffic congestion continued to be one of the major problems.

In view of this, former chief minister YS Rajasekahara Reddy had conceived the HMR project.

The chief minister directed the officials that keeping in mind Maytas consortium’s failure to achieve financial closure, they should further tighten the pre-qualification criteria, apart from increasing the bid security from Rs 60 crore to Rs 240 crore and performance security from Rs 240 crore to Rs 360 crore. Being implemented in publicprivate partnership (PPP) at an estimated cost of Rs 12,132 crore, a maximum of 40 percent of the project cost will be given as viability gap funding by the Central and State Governments.

The selection criterion in the financial bids is the lowest grant sought by the successful bidder and the Union Government has already sanctioned Rs 2,363 crore as its share of gap funding for the project.

The Metro Rail will cover three highdensity traffic corridors of the city, spanning over 71 km, providing a reliable, efficient and world-class public transport system together with the Shamshabad international airport and the Outer Ring Road (ORR).

Eight consortia applied for pre-qualification and on the basis of independent evaluation reports of their technical and financial credentials by reputed technical, legal and financial consultants, the State Government pre-qualified all of them a few days ago to participate in financial bids.

–Agencies