The Chennai Corporation has invited bids, for the second time, from companies for construction and maintenance of modern bus shelters.
The fresh tender for setting up 642 such facilities across the city was necessitated as the response to the first call was not up to the desired level. In particular, there were not many takers for installing the bus shelters in several north Chennai localities.
In the first tender, the Corporation had offered packages under which the bus shelters were to be set up in north and other parts of Chennai. The potential bidders did not find this suitable. They felt that the advertisement revenue for them from such facilities in north Chennai would be relatively less.
This time, the civic body has floated tenders for bus shelters in each of the 10 zones and expects the response to be better. Each modern facility will have 180 sq ft of advertisement space. “Apart from the bus shelters, only public conveniences are allowed to carry advertisements in the city,” an official of the Corporation said.
Contracts would be awarded on a Build Operate and Transfer basis for 11 years, of which the first year would be towards installing the facilities. The Kilpauk zone has the most number of bus shelters - 109. Tondiarpet and Basin Bridge zones, which account for a substantial portion of north Chennai, have 54 shelters each.
On the strategy of the Corporation in the event of poor response for the packages in north Chennai, commissioner D. Karthikeyan said that if the civic body gets good rates for bus shelters in other areas, it would consider setting up the facilities on its own in north Chennai.
The shelters would have seating arrangements, enough lighting and a 4 feet x 2 feet lighting panel for displaying the bus route numbers. In an earlier package, the Corporation had awarded a contract to Laqshya Media to instal 99 shelters on BOT basis. The company has installed 15 bus shelters in various parts of the city and would finish the work on 25 more by next weekend.
A representative of the company said that all 99 shelters would be installed by mid August. “The advertisement panel would have 28 tubelights and the lights would be turned on at 6 p.m. and be on till 5 a.m. the next morning,” he said.
