Unity’s road works crawled at 1.80 kms per year

NAGPUR: Unity Infraprojects Private Limited, which was under contract from the Nagpur Municipal Corporation (NMC) to construct cement-concrete roads under Phase I, may have set a dubious distinction of undertaking works at the rate of 1.80 kms in a year. It has been working since June 6, 2011 and has managed to complete work only on 8.43 kms in eight years. Unity’s contract was for 26.84 kms over 30 roads.
In comparison, the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) had constructed roads at the pace of 27km per day in the last fiscal and is now working to achieve the target of 45km per day in the current fiscal.
As per NMC’s data, Unity is working on 8 roads of 8.55km on which work on only 5.98km is completed.
As reported by TOI on Thursday, Unity has sought the NMC’s permission to complete works on 8 roads and quit the project as it is facing liquidation. Works on 9 roads with length of 7.98km is incomplete.
NMC sources said that Unity’s proposal is likely to be approved. “Officiating chief engineer Ulhas Debadwar has okayed exit of Unity. The NMC will complete remaining work by appointing another contractor. The difference in cost will be recovered from Unity,” they said.
The project’s estimated cost was Rs101.19 crore as per rates in 2011. Unity had won the contract quoting 23% below the base price — Rs77.91 crore. The cost was revised to Rs123 crore as per 2014 rates which have now increased further in the last five years. Therefore, the cost of remaining works is set to increase too.
The delay in completing the project has caused inconvenience to citizens as roads were blocked for works for a long time. On the Great Nag road from Venkateshwar Nagar to Dhantoli RuB, works started in 2011 and is yet to be completed. Work on Central Bazaar road from Lokmat square to Abhyankar Nagar square too is yet to be completed.
Also, the roads yet to be concretized were not repaired and their condition has progressively deteriorated in eight years. The stretches from Roads from Mokshadham to MSRTC Bus Stand square, Ajni square to Khamla square now are full of potholes and poor surface layer since 2011. The condition of 7 other roads is no different.
NMC officials said the decision to give the entire project to one contractor proved wrong. “Unity did not take up work on different roads at a time. Learning lessons, NMC is executing phase-II and III projects in 22 and 10 packages, respectively. One company is not allowed to take more than three packages. Another problem in phase-I was lack of preliminary surveys to identify utilities, encroachments etc. Delay also happened in taking decisions related to designs, dropping and adding other roads etc. Availability of funds was also an issue,” they said.
Unity officials blamed NMC for faulty designs, delay in giving possession of the roads, paying bills etc. “Clearance of 6 of 9 roads is still awaited,” they said.
The NMC was supposed to start works of phase-II after completing phase-I and next phases in similar manner. At present, works of all three phases are going on simultaneously.