Sri Lanka Railways Forum

This callous attitude is today on display at the Transport Ministry, where moves are afoot to purchase equipment for the Railways Department and the Sri Lanka Transport Board (SLTB) for a total cost of over Rs.1 billion.

Steel against concrete

The Railways Department is procuring steel ’sleepers’ for its railway tracks at a total cost of US$ 6.4 million. Sleepers are the bars laid perpendicular to a rail line atop which the actual rail track is placed. Most railway lines in Sri Lanka use sleepers made out of relatively cheap timber, or sturdier, but far heavier, concrete.

Partly due to a national timber shortage, but more due to some inexplicable allergy to widely used (and locally manufactured) concrete sleepers, the Transport Ministry has chosen to tender for steel sleepers to be imported, instead of making do with cheaper Sri Lankan made sleepers.

The Ministry tender for 50,000 steel sleepers received two responses, one of which was unfit even for consideration, resulting in the tender being awarded to the only other bidder, who was another foreign manufacturer, keeping a 1% (US$61,830) commission for the local agent.

Should concrete or wooden sleepers been purchased instead, the total cost of the materials could have been cut by as much as half, to a modest US$3 million. More than the cost saving, what is inexplicable is that the Ministry chose to go against the advice of several Railways Department engineers in choosing steel over other materials.

“We know that steel has been harder to maintain,” a senior engineer told The Sunday Leader on condition of anonymity. “We used to have facilities to manufacture concrete sleepers within the department, but these are now run down. The problem with steel sleepers is that unlike the wooden ones they don’t absorb impact shock, and instead pass the whole shock on to the locomotive. This will be a huge drain on our loco maintenance costs.”

“It is also difficult to prevent the steel sleepers from rusting, and most countries with rails like ours only use them on a temporary basis. For example it is impossible to safely run trains at high speeds over steel sleepers,” a retired Railway Department mechanical engineer said.

Colossal waste

Transport Minister Dulles Alahapperuma has already obtained cabinet approval for the purchase, and is thus set to waste US$6,000,000 in preciously scarce foreign exchange on an ill-suited purchase of materials that could have been sourced locally.

The Railways Department was recently plagued by a controversy involving its General Manager, Dr. Lalithsiri Gunaruwan, who along with a senior engineer was accused of trying to sway the outcome of a multi-billion rupee tender for the purchase of 15 locomotives, on the basis of a mid-evaluation attempt to tweak the maximum weight allowed for an individual locomotive on the tracks.

It is little wonder that confusion reigns in the Railways Department with regard to safety specifications if the Ministry’s decision makers make procurements of track equipment against the advice of the department’s senior engineers.

Forbidden to speak

Repeated attempts to contact Dr. Gunaruwan failed as his officials explained that he was extremely busy with meetings. Other railway officials apart from the department’s general manager have been forbidden by the government to speak to the media – in the wake of The Sunday Leader’s expose on the locomotive tender – and thus none were willing to speak to The Sunday Leader on the record.

Thus it is due to yet more negligence and inefficiency that perfectly good vehicles are left to ruin and new ones have to be imported at a high cost to the public, in order to fulfil the critical need of expanding the availability of public transport in rural areas.

The proceedings of the bus tender itself are a little mysterious. The National Procurement Guidelines state in Section 2.5.1 (a) that government procurement committees are bound to “ensuring that the funds are available for the procurement action under consideration.” The committees are thus bound to ensure that there is enough money available to award the tender in full to the winning bidder.

This measure is primarily used to prevent corruption; so that a procuring agency cannot, upon completion of a tender, should it have not been awarded to their favourite party, decide that there are “insufficient funds” and scrap the tender for the benefit of a chosen party.

Yet for the bus tender, which the Cabinet Appointed Procurement Committee (CAPC) recommended be awarded jointly to two parties, the CAPC proposed that “in case of limited allocation of funds, it should be awarded on pro-rate basis (2:1).”

This CAPC recommendation was echoed by Minister Dulles Alahapperuma in his Cabinet Memorandum MT/49/2008 despite the procurement guidelines making clear that a tender should not be called unless adequate funds are available to complete the procurement.

Scraping the bottom

Thus the Ministry has now completed two tenders, in which a little foresight and care could have saved the country several hundred million rupees. To put this in perspective, the government’s “clean up Colombo for SAARC” programme cost under Rs. 300 million, which means the saving on these purchases alone would have been enough to do up even more of Colombo’s roads.

It is little wonder that the government is scraping the bottom of the Treasury barrel for the odd coin, given the callousness with which it is spending public money. It is also unlikely that their behaviour will change before virtual bankruptcy grinds the country to a standstill.

By Ranjith Jayasundera
Source: The Sunday Leader

                            

This entry was posted on Monday, August 4th, 2008 at 7:03 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.