The Hindu : Front Page : Government, DMRC part ways

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Wednesday, Sep 24, 2008
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Government, DMRC part ways

HYDERABAD: A day after the government has threatened Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) Managing Director, E. Sreedharan, with a defamation suit if he did not apologise for his remarks against the Hyderabad Metro, both decided to “mutually terminate” their agreement.

“The DMRC has informed it was voluntarily withdrawing from the agreement which it signed with the government to be the prime consultant for the project and we have accepted it,” announced Hyderabad Metro Rail Managing Director N.V.S. Reddy late on Tuesday evening.

DMRC had signed an agreement with the government in January, 2007 to become the ‘prime consultant’ for five years to supervise technical aspects of the project, draft project report, vet technical bids preparation, review project implementation plan, assist in negotiation with bidders, vet draft concessionaire agreement, so on.

Simply put, they were involved in the project from conceptualisation to bid awarding stage as they also played a crucial role in conducting feasibility studies and route finalisation. “In fact, they recommended the public, private partnership model to us,” remarked an official, still disappointed over the turn of events.

“As prime consultant, they have done their duty and at the most, we wanted them to be a secondary technical support as we have already called for global bids to select an Independent Engineer to oversee the construction work and vet the designs submitted by the BOT developer (Maytas consortium),” explained an official.

Top officials of DMRC including key Directors have been visiting Hyderabad regularly to oversee the planning stage and very recently, it had even advertised for posts of Chief Engineer and other technical personnel for the project here. The HMR had kept the entire ground floor vacant to house the DMRC officials. DMRC was to be paid Rs. 18.33 crore over the entire period of project construction with 10 per cent as mobilisation advance and the rest in 20 equal instalments. So far, the government had paid about Rs. 4 crore and a Rs. 85-lakh payment was pending. The question of filing a defamation suit would have to be taken by the government, said an official.

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