The Cabinet has approved a Rs. 1,318.3 million contract to widen and upgrade a three-kilometre section of the Kandy-Jaffna road running through Vavuniya town, the Daily Mirror reported at 3.12 p.m. on Tuesday.
The contract covers the stretch from kilometre 176+000 to kilometre 179+000 and went to M/s Karnwel Constructions & Civil Engineering (Pvt) Ltd as the lowest responsive bidder.
Seven bids were received under the National Competitive Procurement Procedure, and the award followed an evaluation of those bids. The proposal was submitted for Cabinet approval by the Acting Minister of Transport, Highways and Urban Development.
The Rs. 1,318.3 million figure is exclusive of VAT, so it is not the full cost to the state.
What the rate works out to
At Rs. 1,318.3 million for three kilometres, the contract prices the work at roughly Rs. 439 million per kilometre before VAT.
That is close to double the rate in the most recent comparable award on the same road. On 13 October the Cabinet approved Rs. 1.07 billion for 4.76 kilometres of the A009 between kilometre 58+240 and kilometre 63+000 — about Rs. 225 million per kilometre, inclusive of contingencies and excluding VAT. That contract went to Tudawe Brothers (Pvt) Ltd, the lowest of eight bidders.
Urban sections are routinely more expensive than open-road stretches — land acquisition, utility diversions, drainage and traffic management all add cost, and the Vavuniya award covers a town centre. Neither filing explains the gap, and no official comparison has been offered, so the difference is set out here as arithmetic rather than as a finding.
Two different contracts on one road
These are separate awards three weeks apart on different parts of the Kandy-Jaffna road, not revisions of a single contract. They differ on every field: value, length, chainage, contractor and the number of bids received.
Searches for either one return the other, and aggregator coverage of the two has circulated under near-interchangeable headlines. Readers should check the chainage and the contractor before treating any figure as current.
Not reported
The filing does not give a start date, a construction period or a completion target. It does not name the funding source, say whether the work falls under the National Highways Widening and Upgrading Programme as the October award did, or report the value of the bids that lost.
It does not identify the Acting Minister by name, nor say whether the High Level Procurement Committee and Procurement Appeal Board recommended the award, as they did in October.
Single source. No other verified newsroom had filed on this award at the time of writing. Coverage elsewhere appeared only on aggregator sites, which are not cited here. Ada Derana remains unreachable from this desk and EconomyNext’s origin returned an error.
