Planning and development: Four months in, road near airport only 6% complete

Chief minister to hear Ring Road Southern Loop public-private partnership plans.

LAHORE:

A short road connecting the Ring Road to Ferozepur Road on which construction work began in May is only six per cent complete and will take at least another three or four months to complete, The Express Tribune has learnt.

Work on the 3.16km road running alongside Khaira distributary began on May 24 and the project was estimated to cost Rs334.649 million. But while the project planners initially envisaged it as a road rehabilitation job, they later decided to build the road from scratch, including rebuilding a sewage drain.

The two-lane road would serve as an important connector of the Ring Road past Allama Iqbal International Airport to Ferozepur Road. Currently, the Ring Road ends about eight kilometres past the airport. The Southern Loop of the Ring Road is to start from that point, but work on it has not yet started.

Officials of the National Logistics Cell, the contractor for the project, said the main reason for the delay in building the connecting road was that a sewage drain had to be rebuilt. They said more that 200 illegal sewage lines from various housing societies had been connected to the drain.

The officials said that the rebuilt drain would be finished in about a month, and building the road would take around another three months on top. They said that the road was six per cent complete and that there could be further delays. They said there are around 140 electricity poles along a one-kilometre stretch of the road near Ferozepur Road and they were relying on Lesco to move them.

They said that the NLC had contacted Lesco to ask they remove the poles, but they had been busy with the Bus Rapid Transit System project. They said that the NLC, which is also the contractor for the BRTS, had also been somewhat sidetracked.

Deputy Project Director Najam Waheed said that engineers were working on the road “at full throttle” and would hopefully finish it in three months. He said that the cause of the delay was the change in design. “When we started it was meant to be more of a rehabilitation project, but the design was later changed by the government and we had to start from scratch. We had to widen the existing 18 feet road to 24 feet and build a proper sewerage drain,” he said.

Southern Loop

Sources in the Punjab government said that the chief minister is expected to meet with officials within the next few days for briefings on the road project and to discuss the Southern Loop. They said that the meeting would consider building the 48km Southern Loop, which the government estimates will cost about Rs58 billion (including Rs30 billion for construction and Rs20 billion for land acquisition), through a private-public partnership.

Under the partnership, a private company would build the road out of its own pocket and then be paid Rs170 billion over the course of the next 17 years, at Rs10 billion each year. There would be no payments for the first three years. The sources said that it had been estimated that nine years after completion, tolls from the Ring Road would generate about Rs10 billion a year. They said that eight companies had shown an interest in the project and four had been short-listed, including Turkish company Albarak, China Construction, the Frontier Works Organisation and local firm SKB (Saadullah Khan & Brothers).

Arshad Mehmood, the head of the Public Private Partnership Cell at the Planning and Development Department, said that the evaluation of financing alternatives was in its very early stages and it was uncertain if this was the option the government would choose. Even if an agreement was reached, the company would then spend at least another six months studying the project.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 12^th, 2012.