Kalurghat road-rail bridge: Ministry decides to review cost 17 days after approval

The railways ministry has decided to review the cost of the Kalurghat road-rail bridge project, 17 days after the interim government approved the Tk 1,156.77 crore project. It has formed a four-member committee, led by ASM Ashraful Alam, additional secretary (audit and ICT) of the ministry, to submit a report reviewing the estimated project cost, said officials.

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The body will have representatives from the Road Transport and Highways Division (RTHD), Bridges Division, and Buet, reads the ministry circular issued on October 24. "Following the directive of our adviser [railways ministry adviser], the committee was formed to review the component-wise cost of the project," Railways Ministry Secretary Abdul Baki told The Daily Star yesterday.

He said the committee will check whether any unwanted component was added to the project or cost was inflated irrationally. Although the body has been asked to submit its report within seven working days, the RTHD named its representative HM Salauddin Monzu, a senior assistant secretary, for the committee on October 30. The move came amid widespread allegations that many projects were undertaken by the previous Awami League government at inflated costs without carrying out proper feasibility studies.

However, the Kalurghat road-rail bridge project was approved by the Executive Committee of the National Economic Council (Ecnec) on October 7 with Chief Adviser Prof Muhammad Yunus in the chair. The approval came following a decade of planning to build a new bridge over the Karnaphuli river at Chattogram's Kalurghat to replace the century-old bridge there. Of the total cost, South Korea will provide Tk 7,125.14 crore as soft loan while the government bear the rest.

The deadline of the project is December 2030. Construction of the dual-gauge double-line rail plus double-lane road bridge aims at reducing bottleneck on Dhaka-Chattogram-Cox's Bazar rail corridor. Built in 1931, the existing metre-gauge single-line rail bridge at Kalurghat was reconfigured in 1962 so that vehicles could use it too.

With time, the bridge has become unsafe, and the authorities had to repair the bridge occasionally. The bridge was repaired last year when Bangladesh Railway launched Dhaka-Cox's Bazar train service via the bridge. However, the process to replace the bridge started in 2014 when the government decided to build the new bridge and decommission the British-era single-lane rail and road bridge there.

A feasibility study, financed by South Korea, was conducted in December 2015 that recommended building a two-lane road and single-line rail bridge. A Development Project Proposal (DPP) for the new bridge with an estimated cost of Tk 1,163.27 crore was placed before an Ecnec meeting in August 2018, which decided that it would build a dedicated rail bridge with double lines. The DPP was not approved at that time.

BR submitted a fresh DPP this year following a new study and conceptual design by consultants of South Korea last year, estimating the project cost at 11,560.77 crore. BR sources said that as per the DPP prepared in 2018, the bridge was supposed to be dual-gauge single-line road-rail bridge, and the length of the proposed bridge was 700m along with a 3.8km embankment. But the new one would be a dual-gauge double line road-rail bridge.

In 2018, the vessel clearance (vertical limit) was 7.62 metres, but now the vessel clearance must be 12.2 metres following the directive of Bangladesh Inland Water Transport Authority (BIWTA). Due to the rise in vessel clearance, the railway authorities have to build a total of 6.20km long (3.32km + 2.88km) viaduct on both sides of the 700m long main bridge, raising the project cost many folds, the BR sources added. Moreover, a sharp rise in the US dollar exchange rate and prices of construction materials were the other reasons behind going up the project cost, they said.

A BR official, wishing anonymity, said the review would have been done before approval of the project, because it would cause delay in starting the work.

References

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