The Madras High Court on Friday wanted to know the response of the State government to a writ petition filed by Larsen and Toubro (L&T) seeking a direction to the Special Projects Department in Greater Chennai Corporation to set aside the award of a crucial contract related to the smart city project.
Justice Pushpa Sathyanarayana insisted on a reply by December 10. She also ordered notices to Kerala State Electronics Development Corporation and a Coimbatore-based private firm to which the contract for designing, supplying, implementing, operating and managing a command and control centre (CCC) had been awarded.
In its affidavit, L&T pointed out that the Centre had proposed to create 100 smart cities within five years and selected 20 cities in January 2016. Chennai was among the selected cities for the project aimed at transforming them into world-class commercial cities that were economically vibrant, ecologically sustainable and inclusive.
It also aims to improve urban mobility by providing various transport choices through integration of rail, high quality buses, improved infrastructure for walking and cycling and uniform carriageways for personal transport. Improved solid waste and stormwater management, rain water harvesting as well as continuous water supply were some of the other initiatives proposed.
One of the crucial features of the project was the setting up of a CCC along with a smart data centre and disaster recovery centre. The CCC would be integrated with smart sensors, edge equipments such as variable messaging board, CCTV surveillance, mobile command and control centre and technology based solid waste management system.
It was an extremely complex job to establish the CCC and the petitioner company, being an infrastructure behemoth, participated in the tender process. However, its bid was rejected and instead firms that did not even satisfy the pre-qualifying requirements for participating in the tender process had been awarded the tender, the petitioner alleged.