The time has come for Belgaum City Development Authority (BUDA) to call for tenders for the third time to award the contract for the work of the new Master Plan of Belgaum. As a result, there will be another delay in the selection of the contractor and the start of the actual master plan work.
A new master plan will be prepared for the existing 27 villages in Belgaum city and Buda area. The tenure of the current master plan ended on March 31, 2021 and the new master plan was supposed to come into force from April 1, 2022.
But that has not happened. Buda floated a tender in 2019 to prepare a new master plan. However, it was decided to prepare a master plan for major cities through Amrit Yojana of the Central Government. For this, the state government itself conducted the tender process and completed it in September 2020. At that time E-GIS Company got the contract for master plan work of three cities namely Belgaum, Hubli-Dharwad and Gadag.
The said company was given a deadline of March 31, 2021 to complete the work. But the company could not meet this deadline. Therefore, the company was given an extension to complete the work.
The company had also completed the base map work related to the master plan. The government rejected the demand of the company to pay the bill for the subsequent work. As a result, in March 2022, the company stopped working on the master plan.
Efforts were made to get the company to resume operations but those efforts were unsuccessful. Therefore, the government has canceled the contract of E-GIS company and given the responsibility of the master plan to Buda. But Buda has unfortunately failed to get a contractor for the master plan work despite two attempts.
