CCTV project stuck over BMC ‘fee’ demand

Interested bidders have told the government that waiving this charge would make the project more economically viable. “We have written a couple of times to the BMC asking it to waive off the charges. However, it has not given us a reply,” a senior state government official said.

Before carrying out any work on the city roads, permission is required from the BMC and a certain “fee” is to be paid to the agency. State government officials estimated that in this case the money to be paid could be as high as Rs 120 crore.

“It is a project meant for the safety of the city. Agencies should not be making money out of a project which is of such significance. Even in Pune, the Pune Municipal Corporation had waived of its charges for the city’s CCTV project,” the official added.

Interestingly, the state government, which has tendered the project for the third time, has been forced to extend the last date of submission from February 13 to February 24 as no bidders showed up to submit their bids. The stringent bidding conditions, under which a company needs to have a turnover of Rs 1,000 crore, and the insistence of the BMC in recovering its fees is putting off several parties from bidding for the project.

Officials claim that if the BMC does not respond soon, the project could get delayed even further. They said that 38 bidders had purchased the bid document, and they had received 882 queries from the bidders on various aspects of the project, including on how the state planned to tackle the issue of the BMC’s fees.  “We only have seven more days before the bid submission deadline,” the official added.

Additional municipal commissioner SVR Srinivas refused to comment on the issue.

The Maharashtra government was planning to place close to 6,000 CCTV cameras across Mumbai in the wake of the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks. The cameras were to be installed at 1,500 identified location,  with an average of 14 cameras per sq km.

zeeshan.shaikh@expressindia.com