The Cabinet has awarded contracts worth more than Rs. 4 billion to five companies for road improvement works, and separately approved a Rs. 91.2 million consultancy to study how to reduce traffic congestion in Colombo, Cabinet Spokesman and Minister Nalinda Jayatissa said on Tuesday.
Both decisions came out of the same weekly Cabinet sitting and both run through the Road Development Authority, but they are different kinds of spending: one is construction already tendered, the other is a study that has yet to produce a recommendation.
The road contracts
Five firms won the road infrastructure improvement bids, EconomyNext reported: Asset Engineering (Pvt) Ltd, Nagma Engineering (Pvt) Ltd, K D A Weerasinghe, Senerath Engineering and Komuthi Engineering.
The largest identified award goes to Asset Engineering, which takes Rs. 744.68 million to improve the Blackpool–Ambewela–Pattipola–Horton Plains Road (B512) between the 12+500km and 18+000km marks — an upcountry stretch running through the approach to Horton Plains. Nagma Engineering takes Rs. 645.69 million for a second road section.
Those two awards together account for about Rs. 1.39 billion of the total, leaving roughly Rs. 2.6 billion spread across the remaining three contractors. The per-contract breakdown for those three could not be retrieved: EconomyNext’s article pages were returning server errors at the time of writing, and the figures above are the ones recoverable from the outlet’s own listing and filing.
The Colombo congestion study
The second decision hires Master Hellie’s Engineering Consultants for a feasibility study on reducing traffic congestion in Colombo, EconomyNext reported.
The contract is worth Rs. 91.21 million excluding VAT, made up of a local component of Rs. 52.44 million and a foreign component of US$ 122,859. The study covers the areas around Lotus Junction, the Port Access Expressway and Marine Drive — the corridor carrying traffic between the port, the Fort business district and the southern coastal route.
The Road Development Authority had invited expressions of interest from consultants before the award.
Context
The approvals land in the same week the World Bank told the government that its problem with capital spending is execution rather than money. In its latest Development Update, the Bank found only about 16.7% of the full-year capital budget had been spent by mid-year and attributed the shortfall to “weaknesses in public investment management, including project selection, procurement, and implementation capacity — rather than financing constraints.” Contract awards of this kind are the procurement stage that finding points at.
A separate Rs. 2.89 billion Baseline Road extension contract approved in late September is a different decision and should not be read as part of this package.
Not reported
The full list of which road sections the other three contractors will work on, and at what value, is not available. No completion timelines were given for any of the contracts, and no funding source was identified. For the Colombo study, neither the duration nor the reporting deadline was stated, and there is no indication what the foreign component of the fee covers or whether the study is expected to recommend new construction, traffic management changes, or both.
