After seven extensions for nearly three months, the municipal corporation (MC) has finally received two proposals against the request for proposal (RFP) for the development of integrated solid waste management project.
The RFP was floated on March 21, it was about to close on April 7 and later was extended till June 23.
Superintending engineer Sham Lal Gupta said, “We have received two bids for the tender.”
He added that both proposals will now be technically evaluated. If both the proposals pass the technical evaluation, then the civic body will consider their quoted costs and award the contract to the L1, or the lowest bidder.
However, in case even one of the two proposals fails the technical evaluation, the tender will be discarded, and a new RFP will be issued instead.
While one of the two firms that have made the bids is from India, the other is Chinese.
The ambitious 1408 crore project titled ‘Development of integrated solid waste management (collection, transportation, processing & disposal) for Ludhiana MC through public private partnership’ includes door-to-door collection of municipal solid waste (MSW) in a segregated manner from waste generators of the corporation, transportation of MSW up to the secondary compactor transfer stations and a processing and disposal facility.
The corporation had been floating tenders for this project for over a year with revised RFPs, but so far it had failed to attract any investor. The long commitment and high cost of the project were seen to be making the contractors apprehensive.
The new project is very critical given the fact that the city lacks the capacity to process the amount of waste it produces. The city produces around 1100 metric tonnes of municipal solid waste every day; the daily processing capacity at the solid waste management plant at Jamalpur is only 300 metric tonnes. This huge gap between the waste coming into the plant and what can be processed leads to the accumulation of waste into large mounds of garbage that keep increasing with every passing day.
