TEAM HERALD
PANJIM: The request for quotation, for the greenfield airport at Mopa, is ready except for a bit of fine tuning and could be floated at long last, even as early as this month itself, officials in the Directorate of Civil aviation have confirmed.
The RFQ will decide the concessionaire – the winner – for the Rs 3000 crore project. The past one year has not seen much movement on the Mopa front with the file being kept on the back burner even though the land acquisition proceeding for the linking road from the airport site to the highway has not yet started. However, land for the airport itself has been acquired even though there is a litigation pending on a certain section of the land.
The new airport is to be developed on a public private partnership (PPP) basis with the state’s contribution being restricted to providing land.
However, to see the government through the final stretch of this long drawn process, a new IAS officer Ameya Abhyankar, has been appointed in place of Anand Sherkane as special secretary (finance-budget) and will also be director of PPP cell.
An order issued by the personnel department late on Monday evening said that Sherkhane would now go back to being the director of planning statistics and evaluation.
Pawan K Sain has been designated as secretary, civil aviation, and given charge of departments of civil aviation, mines and geology and information and publicity.
“The RFQ will probably be out by the end of the month,” Director of Civil Aviation S Shambagui told Herald , on Tuesday that “Most things have been completed. Everything is ready but there is a bit of fine tuning required.”
When asked about the delay given that officials had been saying that the document was ready long back, he said that the document has to be perfect. “Whatever comes out has to be without problems.”
“It is a long drawn out process. We have to prepare it well,” he said, “A series of documents are going into the tendering process,” clarifying that though this was a RFQ, “this was also like a tendering process.”
The selection process that is to start now will involve a two stage process –the government’s part in the PPP project is to give the land for which the total acquisition process has been completed..
According to officials, once the proposals come from the interested parties after the request for quotations these will be first assessed to find out whether they qualify. Prospective bidders will be checked out to assess the quality of the prospective bidders, their ability to bear the costs, technical proficiency and other such parameters.
At the second stage the authorities will decide whether the prospective candidates will be able to handle the project or not and then finally the concessionaire will be finalized.
It may be recalled that the chief minister had last year promised that the bidding process would start by March 2013 and had cited an environmental clearance delay in initiating the bidding process and that the over Rs 3,000 crore airport would be ready in the next four years.
On completion of all its phases by 2045, Mopa is slated to handle 30 million passengers by 2045.
