The Rs 500-crore project funded under the JNNURM ran into trouble after the law department of state government declared the entire tendering process carried out by the previous KMC board as illegal.

“The new civic board has decided to issue fresh tender for the project and the process for the same has already begun,” said Mayor-in-Council (Health) Atin Ghosh, who was chairman of Public Accounts Committee in the previous board.

The new mayor, Shovon Chatterjee, assured that this time “proper procedures” will be followed. “There are so many discrepancies and everything is not clear,” said Chatterjee and added that the process of issuing fresh tender “will take time”.

The project that began in 2007 was consistently missing deadlines. By December 20, 2009 when the project should have been completed, only 17 per cent of the entire work was found to be completed. Subsequently, in January 2010, the then mayor Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharya dismissed MPS Michigan, one of the companies carrying out the contract, for missing the deadline.

“The then mayor illegally ordered a foreclosure without ordering any penalty to the firm and left no scope for negotiation,” said Ghosh.

The civic board then distributed the pending work among the remaining two agencies — Angel Liner and Michael Beau — without issuing fresh tenders. But after the Trinamool came to power in the KMC, the new board was in a fix over the project, which was progressing at a snail’s pace. The new board was undecided whether to cancel the entire contract and issue fresh tender or allow the incumbent firms to continue with their work.

Finally, with the state government giving a nod in favour of a retendering this week, the new board has started the contract-awarding process afresh.

Apart from deadlines, the project was mired into allegations of misappropriation of funds and use of sub-standard products.

“The liners used in the project were supposed to be imported from Sweden. But instead the firms used local made ones. The locally-made liners were not even quality certified by ISO 9001-2001,” said Ghosh.