A meeting chaired by B. Ramanath Rai, Minister in-charge of Dakshina Kannada, here on Tuesday decided to invite expression of interest under public-private-partnership (PPP) mode at the national level for building a modern bus stand with civic amenities at Pumpwell.
The Mangaluru City Corporation would invite the expression of interest. At the same time, the meeting decided to ask the Karnataka Housing Board to prepare a concept plan under PPP model and submit a report.
It decided that the corporation should specify its requirements in clear terms to enable the agencies to prepare the plan. The meeting decided that the expression of interest should be invited within a fortnight and the bidders should be given 60 days to submit their proposals.
Deputy Commissioner A.B. Ibrahim said that the expression of interest should be invited within June 10. The proposed bus stand should have provision to park at least 50 light motor vehicles, he said.
Mr. Ibrahim suggested that the corporation prepare its own internal project plan.
Earlier, the corporation had asked the Infrastructure Development Corporation (Karnataka) Ltd (I-deck) to prepare the concept plan as about seven acre land was reserved for the purpose.
A consultant of the corporation told the meeting that I-deck had submitted the plan taking into account the availability of only 4.5 acre land. According to it, only 66 buses could be parked in a two-storeyed bus stand. But the actual requirement of the corporation was to park 160 buses.
The I-deck gave two options costing Rs. 77.67 crore and Rs. 134.46 crore. But the requirements of the corporation have not been met. The issue of acquiring a patch of 136 cents of land having six houses and another patch of 19 cents land having a house close the site reserved for the project was discussed. The meeting decided that if it was to be acquired market rate for the property owners should be given. But the meeting did not take a final decision on acquiring the land.
Ever since the government acquired about seven acres of land for the project about five years ago, the proposal has not made any major head way except holding of meetings and concept plan level discussions.
