BMC to conduct hearing to decide on termination notice issued to contractor

Velrasu added that besides this, the decision on retendering for the work will also be taken in the coming week.
Two weeks ago, the civic body had issued a show cause notice for termination to one of the five contractors — ‘M/s Roadway Solutions Infra Limited’ (RSIL) — who had been awarded the work to carry out concretisation of roads covering eight municipal wards in island city, giving them a period of 15 days to file a reply. Owing to the delay in the commencement of works, the civic body had previously levied a penalty of Rs 10 crore on this contractor, in May this year. Meanwhile, Shiv Sena (UBT) leader Aaditya Thackeray questioned whether the civic body would blacklist the company in question. Taking to social media (X), he wrote, “One contractor from their favourite five has been served a termination notice period, which ended on October 26. The reply given, the BMC is due to hear the termination notice issue this week. The question is, will the BMC be forced to accept a khoke (crore) settlement? Or will the BMC blacklist the contractor?”

Furthermore, Aaditya Thackeray fired a salvo at the civic body for not completing works on even a single kilometre of road, despite the onset of the fair season of road works in Mumbai, which commences on October 1 and ends May 31.

Hours after the opposition leader launched a volley of allegations, the BMC maintained that the concretisation work is underway at full swing across 123 roads of the western and the eastern suburbs.

In a statement issued late Saturday, the civic body said that of the 123 roads where the concretisation works have commenced, 96 roads were situated in the western suburbs. “In 83 of them, rain water channel works are in progress and in 13 places, work on traffic excavation is ongoing. It will be concretised as soon as possible,” said a civic official. Meanwhile, the other swathes (27) are located in the eastern suburbs of which excavation work is ongoing at eight spots while rain water channelling work is being undertaken at the remaining spots.

After the Eknath Shinde and Devendra Fadnavis government came into power in July last year, CM Shinde had announced making the roads of Mumbai pothole-free by converting them into CC roads by 2024.

Following this, the civic body announced concretisation of 397 km of roads and floated tenders worth Rs 5,800 crore in August 2022, making it the most expensive contract for roadworks in the city’s history. Due to inadequate response from bidders, however, this tender was scrapped with the civic body floating a fresh tender to the tune of Rs 6,070 crore, and five contractors were given work orders for completing the project. The work orders were issued on January 18, 2023, one day before Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the mega road concretising project during his rally in Bandra Kurla Complex (BKC) along with a slew of civic infrastructure projects.