Awarding of work to the lowest bidders, lack of skilled workers and manpower shortage are some of the key reasons blamed for the low quality of work in the construction sector. This was shared by local contractors and engineers who attended a daylong conference at Lingmethang in Monggar recently. The meeting was organized by the De-suung National Service Road Construction Project.
Fifty-two participants including private contractors and engineers from both the government and private sectors took part in the conference. During the discussions, some contractors said low estimation of work costs also poses a challenge in ensuring quality during construction works.
“Contractors fail to maintain quality in the construction sector due to low estimated costs. If the government can look into how cost estimates of works are calculated and also look into the quotation rates, I am sure we can maintain good quality,” said Birkha Bahabdr, who owns Biky Construction. “We also need skilled labourers to maintain the quality of work. Since most of our foreign labourers are villagers, there is some problem in the finishing part.”
“When it comes to awarding contract works, the works are directly awarded to the lowest bidder. So when the work is awarded to the lowest bidder, they cannot maintain good quality due to budget constraints,” said Choden, the Project Manager of Issup Construction. “If there is any alternative of awarding the contract work to the average rate bidders, it would help with maintaining the quality of works.”
Government engineers said due to manpower shortage and heavy workload, they are not able to monitor all the construction activities happening at the district and gewog levels. Some contractors also pointed out that in order to maintain a good quality of work, the finance ministry needs to re-visit the rule of awarding the contract work to the lowest bidders.
Meanwhile, officials from the department of roads said that they are planning to come up with an SOP or standard operating procedure for engineers to monitor the quality of work in road construction.
Kinzang Dorji, the Chief Engineer of the Regional DoR Office in Monggar said they “have already started to monitor the testing of materials and work quality strictly. We have also demonstrated how the road construction was carried out with the intention that you will follow the same procedure while laying the granular sub-base and constructing the drains.”
In the afternoon, the participants visited the De-sung National Service Road Construction Project where they were given demonstrations on constructing high-quality roads, drains and walls.
The participants were also taught about the various methods and operations for quality assurance and quality control in road and infrastructure development.
Sonam Tshering, Monggar
Edited by Yeshi Gyaltshen
