Corporation issues termination notice to STP contractor

In yet another attempt aimed at resuming execution of stalled projects, the Coimbatore Corporation has issued notice to the contractor working on the sewage treatment plant (STP) at Nanjundapuram.

According to senior Corporation officials, the civic body had sent the termination notice to the contractor, a Mumbai-based company, seeking explanation within 15 days why its contract should not be terminated or provide a proper time line of how it proposed to complete the ₹ 45-crore project, the aim of which was to treat 40 million litres sewage a day.

The officials said the Corporation was forced to send the letter because the company had not responded satisfactorily to several of its letters to resume the project.

The Nanjundapuram STP was one of the three the Corporation had planned as part of its underground drainage scheme in 2008 under the then Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission, initiated under the Congress-led UPA government.

The civic body had commissioned the Ukkadam STP and would soon commission the one at Ondipudur as the pipeline work to take the sewage to the STP had resumed.

Soon after the Corporation initiated the Nanjundapuram STP project on its 6.24-acre plot, it had to face objections from residents in the vicinity, who took the civic body to the National Green Tribunal. The legal tangle got solved in August 2017 and the Corporation wrote to the contractor to resume the project after incorporating the suggestions the tribunal had given.

By then, the contractor had invested ₹ 17.96 crore of the original estimate of ₹ 33.79 crore. Based on the Corporation’s letter, the contractor along with the civic body engineers inspected the Nanjundapuram STP site to check how much of the infrastructure it had created and machinery erected could be retrieved, as no activity had taken place at the under-construction plant for over four years.

Based on the inspection, the Corporation revised the STP estimate to about ₹45 crore, the sources said. And, while carrying out the inspection, the Corporation had engaged two senior faculty from the Government College of Technology, Coimbatore, as independent observers.

The officials said if the contractor failed to respond satisfactorily, the Corporation would go ahead and terminate the contract. The contractor company could not be reached for its comments.