KATHMANDU-Though the promises were made to supply water of Melamchi Drinking Water Project by this Dashain (October), the contractor and project have blamed each other for the delay in completing projects.
Italian contractor CMC has claimed that there was shortage of budget to continue the project uninterruptedly. However, Melamchi Drinking Water Project, by organizing a press meet on Friday, claimed that the contractor company did not work well though they released the sufficient budget.
Talking to Face-To-face program, Rajendra Raj Pant, senior divisional engineer of the project, said, “We have released the budget regularly. But the 70 percent of the project budget has not been spent on the works. The project has releases the amounts—30 percent in Nepalese currency and 70 percent in US dollars. The amount released in US dollars has not been spent on the project. It has affected the work making it slow.”
However, the contractor company has blamed the project for not releasing budget regularly in time. As a result, the work of installing pipelines, concreting of tunnel and pipeline finishing is delaying, said the contractor company officials.
According to Pant, earlier entrepreneurs supplied the materials on credit but they stopped supplying materials to the contractor company in the pretext of delay or irregular payment. While there should be work of 200km on average daily, only 50m work of finishing is being done every day.
