Bengal deep-sea port: Terms of reference for bids soon

Kolkata: The proposal for deep-sea port in West Bengal came up for a review at a high-level meeting held here on Friday. Mr A.K. Mohapatra, Union Shipping Secretary, presided and senior officials of the West Bengal Government including Chief Secretary and the Commerce & Industry Secretary, Chairman of Kolkata Port Trust, among others, attended it.

Briefing Business Line at the end of the meeting, Mr Mohapatra stated that the terms of reference for inviting bids for the appointment of consultant for the preparation of the detailed project report as well as the implementation of the project would be finalised as early as possible.

Modalities

“At today’s meeting, we discussed the modalities of finalising the terms of reference,” Mr Mohapatra said.

The firms which had earlier responded to expressions of interest did not follow it up with concrete response subsequently. This was presumably because, as he explained, some of them had reservations about certain conditions as laid down in the integrated approach, i.e both consultancy work and implementation of the project.

“We’re looking into the points raised by them,” he said. “But then there is a government system and we’ll try to address as far as practicable the issues raised by them within the framework of the government system.”

In all seven firms had shown expressions of interest. And the matter ended there. At today’s meeting, representatives of five of them were present.

Early this month, the Union Shipping Minister, Mr T.R. Baalu, and the West Bengal Chief Minister, Mr Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, discussed, among other things, the deep-sea port project.