Hai Phong City Urban Transport Development Project worth more than 276 million USD has been saved. Hai Phong City Urban Transport Development Project has been approved by the Bank [...]
The Urban Transport Development Project (GTDT) in Hai Phong city has been agreed in principle by the World Bank (WB) to extend the project completion date. And currently, Hai Phong People's Committee is focusing on completing the necessary procedures to extend, as well as speed up the implementation of this project.
On January 13, 2016, Baodautu.vn published the article "Hai Phong Urban Transport Development Project is at risk of having its capital cut by the WB", reflecting on the slow progress and difficulties encountered by this project. At that time, the project had only disbursed 61.9 million USD, equivalent to about 35% of total funding, while the Agreement on Financing the Hai Phong City Urban Transport Development Project was due to end on December 31, 2016. At that time, the project is at risk of having its funding restructured to transfer capital to another project.
Faced with that situation, on June 20, 2016, the People's Committee of Hai Phong city sent a document to Mr. Achim Fock, Acting Country Director of the World Bank in Vietnam, requesting to extend the credit for another 20 months, i.e. until August 31, 2018. Prior to this request, on August 30, 2016, Mr. Achim Fock agreed in principle with this extension request and requested that the People's Committee of Hai Phong city need to provide full counterpart capital as committed and ensure site clearance progress for the contractor to carry out construction. These are also the two main reasons why project progress is slow as stated in the previous article.
Construction of steel arch of Niem bridge.Currently, the issue of basic counterpart fund arrangement has been resolved. Mr. Doan Xuan Dan, Deputy Director of the Transportation Project Management Board (Project Management Board) said: "Currently, the city has allocated 180 billion VND of counterpart capital in 2016 and reserved 216 billion VND of local government bond capital for the project. The city is also carrying out the necessary procedures to re-borrow 15.5 million USD from the ODA capital of the project." Thus, up to now, Hai Phong city has arranged an additional amount of about 740 billion VND, and the cumulative total counterpart capital allocated for the project has reached nearly 80%.
However, the issue of site clearance to carry out the construction of construction and installation packages is still a major obstacle. Especially with the two packages CW3A - Construction of Rao bridge underpass and access road (Km13+450-Km16+100) and CW4A - Construction of the section from Rao bridge underpass to Nam Hai ward, Hai An district (Km16+100-Km19+870,882) has only achieved 15% progress - very slow(!). As for the entire Component A of the project - Urban trunk road development (excluding the construction of resettlement areas), according to the latest report of the Project Management Board, the total number of households and organizations that need to clear the urban trunk road is 2,725, with a corresponding area of 88.64 hectares. Among them, there are 1,585 agricultural land households with an area of 63.78 hectares; 936 residential land households with an area of 12.05 hectares; 204 organizations and householdsnon-agricultural land family with an area of 12.81 hectares.
It is known that to completely solve this problem, Mr. Nguyen Van Tung, Chairman of Hai Phong City People's Committee, directly worked and directed localities where the project passed through to quickly clear the site and hand it over to the contractor within a specific deadline. These are the latest moves showing Hai Phong's determination to accelerate progress and complete this key project before August 31, 2018. Mr. Dan added that, if favorable, by the end of August, the contract package CW5A - Upgrading Niem 1 bridge and Truong Chinh road may be completed and the Niem 1 bridge will be opened.
Procedures
