The Hindu : Andhra Pradesh / Hyderabad News : BOT bid documents under scrutiny

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Friday, Jul 25, 2008
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Andhra Pradesh

Andhra Pradesh - Hyderabad

BOT bid documents under scrutiny

Special Correspondent

International partners add new dimension as legal papers have to be notarised by respective countries

HYDERABAD: A day after the financial bids were opened and evaluated for the elevated metro rail project for the twin cities, the government is yet to make any formal announcement of the Build, Operate and Transfer (BOT) developer.

On Tuesday too, senior officials of the Hyderabad Metro Rail Limited (HMR) were closeted with the Chief Minister’s Office presumably to discuss the submitted bid documents. The consortium of Maytas Infra, Navabharat Ventures, Ital Thai and IL&FS turned out to be the lowest bidder for the Rs. 12,000 crore project when the bids were examined on Wednesday.

They had offered substantial royalty payment spread over the contract period of 30 years even while declining to seek any government grant (30 per cent from Centre and 10 per cent from State) as viability gap funding.

Their’s was the last bid document to be opened by a government appointed three-member committee in the presence of all the other bidders.

Officials concerned maintained that the government was examining the bid documents with a fine tooth comb as it was the biggest metro project being attempted on a public private partnership mode that too for 76 km in a single go.

“A tender of this size has to be carefully examined from the legal point of view. Every single paper and signature has to be crosschecked lest it become a ‘non-responsive tender’,” pointed out an official.

International partners in the consortia too have added a new dimension as legal papers have to be notarised by respective countries besides being authenticated by the embassies here.

“We are working overtime to expedite the whole legal process. We are hopeful of completing the exercise in the next couple of days,” said HMR Managing Director N.V.S. Reddy.

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