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Ludhiana MC fails to attract bidder for waste management project for sixth time
The current request for proposal (RFP) was floated on March 21 and was supposed close on April 7, but due lack of bidders, the closing date was extended till May 27
The municipal corporation (MC) has extended the tender of development for the Integrated Solid Waste Management project for the sixth time as it faces a hard time finding bidders for it.
The current request for proposal (RFP) was floated on March 21 and was supposed close on April 7, but due lack of bidders, the closing date was first pushed to April 17, then to April 23, May 9, May 18, May 21, and has eventually been extended till May 27.
The ambitious ₹1408 crore project titled ‘Development of Integrated Solid Waste Management (collection, transportation, processing & disposal) for MC Ludhiana through Public Private Partnership’ includes door-to-door collection of municipal solid waste (MSW) in segregated manner from waste generators of the corporation, up to the secondary compactor transfer stations and to processing and disposal facility.
Superintending engineer, Sham Lal Gupta, confirmed the lack of bidders and the extension of the window. “We have now extended the bidding time till Wednesday. We haven’t got any bidders so far,” he said.
The MC in April had released clarification on the queries by stakeholders on the RFP. The corporation said that 35 acres of litigation free land will be handed over to the contractor and that it will make arrangements for any more land needed. It also said that the required number of secondary compactor transfer stations will be given to the contractor. But these clarifications have also failed to draw any bidders.
An MC official talking anonymously said that the corporation has been floating tenders for this project for over a year with revised RFPs but so far it had failed to attract any investor. He added that it was a long commitment and high cost of the project that made contractors apprehensive.
According to sources in the MC, one of the reasons behind the hesitation in contractors was that the current government has only few months left in service and businessmen are uncertain if the new government will continue or shelve the project.
The new project is very critical given the fact that the city lacks the capacity to process the amount of waste it produces. The city produces around 1100 metric tonnes of municipal solid waste everyday, the daily processing capacity at the solid waste management plant at Jamalpur is only 300 hundred metric tonnes.
This huge gap between the waste coming into the plant and what can be processed leads to accumulation of waste into large mounds of garbage that keep increasing with every passing day.
