NEW DELHI: The Union Government on Thursday decided to entrust the remaining three packages of work of dredging 69 million cubic metres in the Sethusamudram Ship Canal Project (SSCP) to the state-owned Dredging Corporation of India (DCI) on a nomination basis, an official spokesperson said after the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA) meeting here.

The SSCP project envisages creating a ship canal to connect the Gulf of Mannar and the Palk Strait, which will result in considerable savings in time for ships sailing between the East coast and the West coast.

Besides, the navigable sea route around the peninsula will be within the country's territorial waters.

The proposal for assigning the remaining three packages to DCI was mooted by the Department of Shipping after two rounds of complex international competitive bidding process which did not yield the desired results as the international bidders quoted conditional bids or exorbitant rates.

The move by the department, presided over by T. R. Baalu, Union Minister of Shipping, Road Transport and Highways, was conceived, particularly in view of the extraordinary performance in completing 7.55 million cubic metres of dredging so far by DCI on a part of the dredging job assigned to it. DCI is set to complete the work well before the target date of July 2007.

The extended assignment to DCI will result in huge savings to the country as the payment to DCI will be restricted to Rs. 2,171.40 crore which is the official updated dredging cost of the project.

The SSCP is a pioneering project having its uniqueness in digging a total length of 89.3 km seaway with 12-metre depth and 300 metre width in the deep sea in the Palk Strait and Adam's Bridge areas, as compared to the existing well-known Suez and Panama Canals where the navigable channels were dug out of the land mass.

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