Contractors abandon Commonwealth Games flats in VK

More last-minute hitches.

The two agencies working on the DDA flats at D6, Vasant Kunj walked out of the project earlier this month expressing their inability to meet the August deadline. The flats were to house 1,500 Indian and 650 foreign technical officials during the Delhi Commonwealth Games. The chief engineer of the site says only 604 of the 5,000-odd flats will be "definitely ready'' by August-end while some more may be complete but he cannot give a figure to it. This despite the fact that in the June 29 GoM meeting, vice-chairman of DDA had said there was likely to be a shortfall of only 130 flats which are at a "very rudimentary stage''. Chief engineer S R Solanki says DDA is looking at options to get the work done through work orders as there was no time to issue full-fledged tenders.

Solanki said: "M/s Brahmaputra and M/s A K Mehta were working on eight towers each. Earlier this month both wrote to us saying they cannot complete the work on time. So we are looking at other ways to get it done. Going by the present situation, 476 flats will be ready by the third week of August and another 128 will be ready by end-August. Some more may be complete but it is difficult to commit right now.''

Interestingly, sources say when the work was awarded to the two agencies the original plan was to incorporate 1% penalty for delays. However, the agencies managed to waive it on the ground that DDA's lethargic way of functioning had already caused them to lose three months. DDA vice-chairman had in the same meeting also informed the GoM that the authority was planning to get additional labour from non-CWG sites shifted to Vasant Kunj to speed up the pace of work which was to be monitored on a daily basis. The agencies walking out have put a spanner to all those plans. The GoM had talked about options of blacklisting defaulting contractors but DDA sources say that now the priority is to get work back on track rather than penalizing errant agencies.

If the flats are not completed in time, the organising committee (OC) which has been insisting that all technical officials stay at one place to facilitate their movement and logistics may end up red-faced. Moreover, Delhi Police has also made it clear that it would be good for security reasons if all foreign technical officials stayed at one place. The GOM had decided that the LG would hold a meeting with the commissioner of police to determine the level of security at the Vasant Kunj complex. All such plans may now need to be drawn up from scratch.