The Kerala Government Contractors’ Association (KGCA) will file a review petition before the Supreme Court, in case there is mention in Tuesday’s apex court order permitting reconstruction of the Palarivattom flyover about the contracting firm that built the structure having to bear the cost of “out of tender and estimate conditions” that are not mentioned in the defect liability clause, KGCA president Varghese Kannampilly has said.
As per the clause, the contracting firm will be responsible for repair works that had to be done on the flyover within three years of its commissioning. The contracting firm RDS Projects will not be bound by the risk and cost parameters of the reconstruction work, since they will be done as per new technical specifications. For example, the flyover was built using reinforced cement concrete (RCC). But reconstruction had been planned using pre-stressed concrete (PSC), he said.
Even presuming that the order does not make it obligatory to recover the reconstruction expense from RDS, the contractors’ body would file a case, seeking pecuniary compensation for the firm. This is because the government encashed the bank guarantee submitted by the firm when it took up the work, soon after cracks on the flyover were detected. The firm has also not been paid the full project cost. It also undertook repairs worth around ₹2.5 crore on the flyover to strengthen it. All that together works out to around ₹10-crore loss for the firm, said Mr. Kannampilly.
E. Sreedharan, Principal Adviser, Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC), rebutted the claim that the contractor was not bound by the defect liability clause if new technical specifications were adopted for the reconstruction. This is because the firm bid for the design-cum-construction work of the flyover. In this case, the design itself was faulty and it was among the reasons cracks developed on the structure. The firm could not escape the liability thus incurred, he told The Hindu.
Meanwhile, sources in the Uralungal Labour Contract Cooperative Society (ULCCS) said that it had been in a position to mobilise workers and machinery within days in September 2019 to begin the reconstruction work which had been slated to begin on October 1, 2019. The work could take a little longer at present, due to the COVID-19 situation, they said. A traffic-management plan too had to be readied prior to beginning the work, since more number of vehicles would converge at Palarivattom when flyovers were commissioned at Vyttila and Kundannoor, they added.