Elevated Expressway
Changed route gets govt nod
Target to complete work by 2016
The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs yesterday approved the final route of the Dhaka Elevated Expressway with a target of completing the project by 2016.
As per the revised final route of the 21km expressway, it will commence at Shahjalal International Airport and pass by Kuril, Banani, Mohakhali, Tejgaon, Moghbazar, Kamalapur, Sayedabad and Jatrabari.
Finance Minister AMA Muhith said the DEE will take traffic over the Gulistan-Jatrabari flyover and end at Kutubkhali near the Dhaka-Chittagong highway to avoid traffic jam on the flyover.
Phase one of the three phase project will be completed in 2014.
Chaired by the finance minister, two meetings of the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs and the Cabinet Committee on Purchase yesterday gave nod to 26 proposals, of which 20 were endorsed by the purchase committee.
So many projects, said Muhith, were never approved by the government on a single day in the past. It happened as there was a backlog of projects due to the Eid-ul-Azha holidays.
The minister hoped that the last meeting of the purchase committee during the tenure of the present government will be held in the second week of November. More meetings could be held even after that, but those will deal only with some routine agenda, he added.
The economic affairs committee endorsed the appointment of a Thai-led joint venture company as the independent engineer for the Dhaka Elevated Expressway project.
Thai firm MM Company Ltd, UK’s Mott MacDonald Ltd and Euroconsult Mott MacDonald of the Netherlands will jointly work as the independent engineer of the project.
The committee also gave the go-ahead to the signing of a production sharing contract (PSC) for a block in the shallow waters of the Bay of Bengal with two foreign oil companies.
Australian Santos and KrisEnergy of the Cayman Islands jointly won the bidding for SS-11 block in August.
The committee endorsed a telecom ministry project proposal for installation of a next-generation network (NGN) based telecommunication network for the state-run telecom company BTCL to provide seven lakh new landline connections and laying fibre optic cable across the country.
In the other meeting, the purchase committee approved proposals for appointment of contractors for two components of the Padma bridge project. Abdul Monem Ltd will be appointed as the contractor for the service area at a cost of around Tk 209 crore.
The committee acceded to another proposal of communications ministry for appointment of a Bangladesh-Malaysia joint venture (Abdul Monem Limited and HCM Engineering Sdn Bhd) for the construction of 11 km Mawa approach road at a cost of around Tk 1,934 crore.
A proposal for setting up a gas based 440-megawatt power plant at Ghorashal was also approved by the committee. Power Development Board (PDB) will purchase electricity from the plant at Tk 1.69 per kilowatt.
Besides, purchases of 94,000 electric poles, 50,000 metric tonnes (MT) of urea fertiliser and 50,000 MT wheat got approval of the committee.
-With The Daily Star input
