ISLAMABAD: Islamabad Highway is the busiest road of the city and the city mandarins have decided to relieve it of the mounting pressure of traffic by widening it.

On Friday, the Capital Development Authority (CDA) awarded Rs1.66 billion contract for adding a fifth lane on both sides of the Zero Point-Faizabad stretch of the highway.

It includes the cost of building an underpass at Faizabad and an interchange at I-8 traffic signal as part of the plan to make the travel signal-free on the highway up to Rawat, according to the project documents.

As speculated in the media, the contract went to the construction firm Makson whose bid was 20 per cent less than the CDA estimated cost of Rs2.31 billion. Media reports had claimed that other competing firms had joined hands with Makson for “pool bidding”.

CDA spokesman denies impression that contractors ‘pooled bids’

CDA spokesman Ramzan Sajid dismissed it as a “coincidence” that the firm the media had predicted won the contract.

“We awarded the contract in a transparent manner,” he said. “There is no question of any pool bidding as the contract was awarded to the firm which submitted the lowest bid.”

CDA had pre-qualified five construction firms for the entire Rs21.8 billion Islamabad Highway widening project from Zero Point to Rawat. The project is to be implemented in phases and Friday’s contract covers the first phase.

Those pre-qualified firms are the National Logistics Cell (NLC), the Frontier Works Organisation (FWO), Zahir Khan and Brothers (ZKB), and two construction consortiums - Shanghai Construction group in partnership with Maqbool Associates, and Maksons Constructions and China Railway First Group in partnership with Technical Constructions.

The project includes development of a signal-free, controlled-access corridor consisting of five-lane dual carriageway with two interchanges at Airport Chowk and Rawat and three flyovers at Sector I-8, the Faizabad Interchange, and Defense Housing Authority.

Spokesman Sajid said the next phases relate to the stretches from Faizabab to Koral and then onwards to Rawat.

Published in Dawn June 27th, 2015

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