Staff Correspondent

The Bangladesh Railways has decided to seek the Infrastructure Investment Facilitation Centre’s opinion for conducting a feasibly study for the construction of an underground railway network by a private sector company to mitigate traffic congestion in the city.

‘Since this is a new concept to us, we have decided to seek the IIFC’a opinion,’ said a senior official of the Bangladesh Railways on Monday.

The IIFC, a government-owned company, provides professional services to line ministries and agencies of the government to frame infrastructure projects for the private sector.

The BR last week asked the communications ministry’s permission to seek IIFC’s opinion on whether there was a need for a feasibility study as Contech Ltd, a local firm that had earlier been pre-qualified by the government for construction of the underground network, requested issuance of a work order for beginning the preliminary work of the underground railway project.

Officials of the BR said that giving the company a work order without conducting a feasibility study would be violation of some clauses stipulated in the government’s Private Sector Infrastructure Guideline.

The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs in January endorsed the communications ministry’s proposal to have an underground railway network built by the private sector.

The underground railway system will be constructed under the ‘build-own-operate’ basis. The provision for constructing an underground railway system was also included in the Strategic Transport Planning for Dhaka approved by the interim government recently.

The communications ministry in June 2006 selected Contech as it was the lowest bidder in the pre-qualification tender floated by the Bangladesh Railway in 2002 for building a 52-km underground railway network at a cost of around Tk 6,200 crore on the ‘build-own-operate’ basis.

Contech offered to build the underground system in four years and to hand it over to the government 34 years later as it sought a 30-year concession to recover its investment and make an adequate amount of profit.

According to Contech’s project design, the underground railway network will have six routes with double lines touching all the busy and strategic points of the city, with Tongi, Syedabad, Gabtali, Mohakhali, Farmgate, New Market and Sadarghat as some of the important junctions.

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