Senate body takes 'U-turn' over Hyderabad-Sukkur Motorway.

ISLAMABAD -- Senate Standing Committee on Communications while taking a U-turn on its earlier position over the procurement process of the Sukkur-Hyderabad Motorway showed a green light to the project on Tuesday. The committee met under the chair of Senator Prince Ahmed Omer Ahmedzai at the Parliament House to discuss irregularities in the award of contracts under Public Private Partnership (PPP) agreement by the National Highway Authority (NHA) in construction of Hyderabad- Sukkar Motorway and Kharian-Rawalpindi Motorway Project. During last meeting of the committee, reservations over the tendering process of the Hyderabad-Sukkur Motorway were expressed by the members and it was decided to write a letter to the Prime Minister and Chairman Senate to lodge a formal inquiry in this regard. However, the situation was entirely different in Tuesday's meeting as the committee discussed the matter quite briefly and extended best wishes to the NHA for timely completion of the project.

Surprisingly, the promoter of the said agenda item Senator Saifullah Abro, who was quite vocal in the last meeting. also remained cool and calm over a presentation given by the NHA's General Manager Azeem Tahir in this regard. The NHA officials gave a briefing on the HyderSenate body takes 'U-turn' over Hyderabad-Sukkur Motorway Committee gives go-ahead signal to project, directs NHA to complete formalities as early as possible abad-Sukkur Motorway (M-6) financial bid comparison between the ZKB and Techno-CMR-ACC. The committee was informed that the evaluated bid cost of ZKB was Rs275.25 billion while the bid cost of TechnoCMC-ACC was Rs307.71 billion. However, unlike ZKB, the successful bidder demanded low capital viability gap funding while it did not demand any operational viability gap funding. The ZKB in its proposal demanded Rs37 billion as Capital VGF while Techno-CMCACC demanded only Rs9.5 billion. On the other side, the ZKB demanded Rs143.9 billion as operational VGF while Techno-CMCACC did not ask for any operational VGF. Meanwhile, the revenue share of...