Seven firms vie for Bhairawaha airport upgradation contract
KATHMANDU, FEB 27 -
Five Chinese construction firms and two Spanish joint-venture (JV) firms are vying for the contract for the upgradation of Bhairahawa’s Gautam Buddha Airport into a regional international airport , as the deadline for submitting bid documents ended on Wednesday.
The Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal (CAAN) said it received seven confirmed bids out of the 37 firms that obtained the bid documents.
The two Spanish JVs are Sanjose and Kalika, and Isoluf Carson and Carvian, while five Chinese firms include Sino Hydro Corporation, North-West Civil Aviation Building Company, China Harbor Engineering, China Overseas Engineering Group and China Volant Company.
CAAN had invited bids on November 28, 2013, for the construction of airside and landside infrastructure and other facilities at Gautam Buddha Airport, but had extended the deadline twice.
Civil works include construction of a new runway, exit and parallel taxiway with flexible pavements, new international aircraft parking apron with rigid pavements, rehabilitation of the existing runway for conversion to parallel taxiway, drainage system parallel to runway, taxiway and diversion of Ghaghara Khola and airport boundary, among others.
“After evaluating the technical documents of the bidders, we will open the financial documents of those who are eligible as per our parameters,” said Murari Bhandari, chief of the project. “We will complete the process at the earliest.”
Eligible bidders must have a minimum average annual turnover of $53 million over the last three years, and must have been involved in at least two projects of a similar nature worth $63 million each over the last 10 years. The government plans to complete the project by 2017.
The airport is termed one of the most viable projects due its potential to draw a large number of Buddhist pilgrims to the birthplace of Gautam Buddha. It will also serve as an alternative to Kathmandu’s Tribhuvan International Airport (TIA), already strained due to heavy traffic.
Due to the lack of a secondary airport , a large number of international flights are compelled to circle the sky or be diverted to Kolkata and Lucknow of India, and Dhaka of Bangladesh, among other airport s, when problems arise at TIA.
The planned airport , with a 3,000-m runway, will be able to handle 600,000 passengers annually after the competition of the first phase of upgradation.
In the second phase (after 10 years), it will handle up to 2 million passengers, and finally, the airport will be able to process up to 6 million passengers
annually when it is complete. The airport will have six international parking bays.
A $99.5-million project has been devised to build the airport in Bhairahawa and infrastructure in Lumbini. The airport component has been valued at $90.6 million.
The first phase of airport upgradation was originally planned to start by the end of 2011. But project hit a roadblock due to the lack of resources after a fresh study showed that another $53 million would be required to complete it. An earlier survey carried out by the ADB four years ago had estimated that the upgradation would cost around $36 million.
The project will be financed by a loan and grant aid of $42.96 million and $12.75 million, respectively, from the ADB under the South Asia Tourism Infrastructure Development Project.
The OPEC Fund for International Development, as a co-financing arm of the ADB, is providing $15 million in loan. The Nepal government and the CAAN will be contributing $29.17 million.
Source: The Kathmandu Post
