Payra Port continues to witness delays, cost spiral

The cost of two projects related to the much-hyped Payra Sea Port continues to shoot up and their completion is facing delays although the port belongs to the government’s list of fast-track projects.

The lack of a proper feasibility study, inappropriate cost estimations and reluctance of the project officials are mainly responsible for the delays in the port’s infrastructure development and the rising construction costs.

Most of the projects linked to the port faced delays while at least one proposal on costs has been revised so far.

Another such revised proposal will be placed in the meeting of the Executive Committee of the National Economic Council (Ecnec) today.

The proposal will demand for increasing the costs alongside seeking more time to build the port’s first terminal and related infrastructure.

The project was undertaken in the beginning of January 2019 and due to be completed by December 2021 at a cost of Tk 3,982.10.

Now, it will be proposed to increase the cost to Tk 4,516.75 crore and another one-and-a-half year for completion.

The cost increase is for adjusting the height of the jetty.

After conducting a hydrological study on the Andharmanik Bridge construction area, the length of the bridge was increased from 1.05 kilometres to 1.17 kilometres by the consultant agency.

For that, the project seeks another Tk 411 crore from the government.

Asked if the implementing authority conducted a proper feasibility study, Planning Minister MA Mannan said actions will be taken if there is any negligence.

“If it’s a human error, then that’s okay. But if there is any negligence in the work, then I will take action against them.”

The minister went on to say that there are direct instructions from the prime minister to take action against those who do not conduct proper feasibility tests and background work that leads to multiple revisions of a project.

A report on the project by the Implementation Monitoring and Evaluation Division (IMED) said only an administrative building for the port’s official use has been built so far.

The report also said the high officials of the project, including its project director, mainly stay in Dhaka and visit the site occasionally. However, technical officials stay on the site.

The national assembly passed the Payra Seaport Authority Act on November 3, 2013, and Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina inaugurated the construction work on November 1 that year.

Later, the premier inaugurated the operational activities of the third seaport on a limited scale in 2016. However, mother vessels still cannot harbour at the port because of incomplete construction of necessary infrastructure.

The full-fledged port activities in Payra will start by 2023, said Finance Minister AHM Mustafa Kamal, who was the planning minister in 2016.

“It would then have the capacity to house 75,000 containers.”

Currently though, this seems to be a far cry as just 106 oceangoing ships have arrived at Payra Port since inception, generating a revenue of Tk 253 crore for the government as of December 2020.

Another project — the primary infrastructure development project of Payra port — is also set to be delayed by two years while the cost will go up by Tk 1,024 crore.

The cost was increased by 23 per cent from the last estimate of Tk 3,350 crore to meet the additional expenses on land acquisition, among others, as the Ecnec approved its third revised proposal in November last year.

The project, which is being implemented by an agency under the shipping ministry, was undertaken in 2015 with an estimated cost of Tk 1,128 crore. The expenditure went up to Tk 3,350 crore in the first revision.

However, around 80 per cent of the project has been completed as of now.

The government’s efforts to prepare the master plan and design Payra deep sea port by engaging the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology and a consultant firm of the Netherlands has not been finalised.

As of now, only 50 per cent of the master plan has been completed.

Meanwhile, a project of Tk 5,148 crore for the construction of a multipurpose terminal in the port is yet to be approved by the project evaluation committee.

For capital maintenance dredging at Rabnabad channel of Payra port, the government has already approved a Tk 6,537 crore project that will continue from 2021 to 2024.

The Payra Port Authority (PPA) already signed an agreement with a Belgium-based dredging company — Jan de Null — in this regard.

A public-private partnership project of Tk 214 crore for the construction of a coal terminal at the port has been taken but the project implementation committee is yet to recast it.

The government undertook another project to build a city in the port area and attract tourists by improving the Kuakata coastal region but that has not progressed much.

This happened as the project has not been able to appoint some senior consultants and consultant agency and for delays in taking decisions and transfer of the project’s workforce, according to the IMED report.

However, IMED Secretary Pradip Ranjan Chakraborty said he visited the port and now the project’s implementation has been accelerated.

The planning minister said the layer of soil in the dredging area is quite different from that in Matarbari and Chattogram.

“When we approved the project, we asked why the cost is so high and they said the Dutch expert suggested that the characteristics of the soil of this area is different,” he said.

Besides, the main reasons for the delay and cost revisions is difficulty in administrative mobilisation, raw material mobilisation and foreign partner mobilisation.

“It’s a scattered and highly-technical work involving complex issues such as working in the deep sea or under the continental shelf,” Mannan added.