Two more silos being built at Tk 893crore

The government has taken initiative to build two more wheat silos in Chittagong and Khulna divisions to increase the country’s food storage capacity, an official of the agriculture ministry said.

The total capacity of these two silos will be 1,90,500 tonnes. The cost of erecting the silos would be Tk 893.46 crore. The World Bank is providing financial assistance in this regard, according to sources in the ministry of food.

The proposal to construct the silos would be placed today (Thursday) in the cabinet committee on public purchase on Thursday. The Chattogram silo will have a capacity of 1,14,300 tonnes at an expense of Tk 536.57 crore while the capacity of the Khulna silo will be 76,200 metric tonnes and will cost Tk 355.91 crore.

A firm, Design and Supervision Consulting Company, has shown interest to build the Chattogram silo which were reviewed by the project officials.

Manufacturers authorization letters and some other documents were not submitted as per the tender requirements by one of the aspiring companies, Partech-PDL JV. Besides, the authorization letter of the authorized representative was not attached in the tender submitted by another firm, KPI.

On the other hand, the submitters of Ferram-NSL JV (Ferram SA and Next Spaces Limited) did not properly link the ‘manufacturer authorization letter’ (MAL), bid security and technical manpower information as per the tender document guidelines.

In this context, only CIL-GSI JV (Confidence Infrastructure Limited and the GSI Group LLC) will construct the silo as an acceptable bidder as assessed by the technical committee.

When the tenders were called for the implementation of the project, a total of 5 manufacturers participated. The project will be jointly implemented by Max Infrastructure Ltd. of Bangladesh and Altuntas, Altuntas Havalandirma Tourism Sanctic S. of Turkey as the lowest bidder.

According to the proposal , construction work on Khulna and Chittagong silos was included in a project named WPP W-1 package. Tenders were called for this package in 2017, but due to lack of fund evaluation of the package and issuing a work order could not be done, then.

Following the signing of the additional financing agreement with the World Bank and the amendment to the DPP, the lowest bidder, TCCL-Frame JV, demanded a price adjustment on June 16, 2020, as it had offered to extend the validity of the tender to the bidders.

But as there was no scope for price adjustment as per the terms of the tender, the Food Department canceled all the tenders for the W-1 package under the direction of the World Bank. After the additional financing agreement and amendment of DPP, with the consent of the World Bank, the W-1 package was broken down into W-24 (Chittagong) and W-25 (Maheshwar Pasha, Khulna) which were then included in the updated procurement plan.

The proposal also said 5 out of 6 silo construction contracts have already been signed, with a total contract value of Tk 1,611.12 crore.