Corpn. floats tender to resume work at Nanjundapuram STP

Work at the Coimbatore Corporation’s site chosen for sewage treatment plant in Nanjundapuram is likely to resume soon.

The Coimbatore Corporation has floated tender inviting bids to restart the sewage treatment plant (STP) work at its site in Nanjundapuram.

According to sources, the civic body floated the tender worth ₹ 43.60 crore recently. The tender is for constructing, erecting and commissioning the plant followed by five years of operation and maintenance.

The plant will treat up to 40 million litres sewage a day using cyclic activated sludge process/sequential batch reactor technology.

The Corporation will give the successful bidder-contractor 18 months to complete the construction of the plant, three months thereafter for trial run and nine months thereafter for monitoring the performance, followed by the five-year maintenance period.

The Corporation floating the tender marks a significant milestone in its efforts to establish a sewage treatment plant in Nanjundapuram in that it had to overcome legal challenges thrown by the Mayflower Sakthi Garden Owners’ Association and Parsn Senior Citizens’ Group.

The two had complained to the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board (TNPCB), Madras High Court and National Green Tribunal that the proposed plant did not meet the ‘minimum distance criterion’ and that their houses were too close to the plant.

They had also alleged that the plant did not have TNPCB’s ‘consent to establish’ order.

At the time of opposition in 2010, the contractor engaged by the Corporation had completed a portion of the work and the civic body had spent ₹ 17 crore of the ₹ 33.79 crore it had earmarked for the purpose.

After the Corporation cleared the legal hurdles, it engaged experts and also the contract-company representatives to assess how much of the machinery/infrastructure it had installed or built could be reused.

Based on the report and after factoring in the cost escalation, the Corporation had floated the tender, the sources added.

The floating of the tender is also significant for the reason that residents in those parts of the city (20 wards) that were to be serviced by the Nanjundapuram sewage treatment plant will soon be able to have house service connections by making use of the underground drainage scheme.