This refers to the article regarding the project weir at Chattabal. It is sad to read that the structure has collapsed after spending so much of tax payers' money to reconstruct the heritage left by Englishmen who originally built it 1910. I had predicted this two years ago while I was on a visit in Kashmir.
 I am a structural design engineer presently residing and working in Britain. I got involved with the above project while I was trying to establish a global design centre in Kashmir in May 2008.
I was approached by the Flood & Irrigation department who mentioned to me that they can't get competent contractors to design and construct this project. We had a few meetings to understand the brief from the client (Irrigation department). I then flew back to Britain to further brief the directors of my company regarding the opportunity to design this prestigious project.
Immediately after, we expressed our interest in the project via various letters and emails to the Chief Engineer. We were eventually asked to prepare the bid documents. It is to be noted that we were the only tenderers at the time and further application for tenders was closed. However to our surprise we were notified after a month or so via a letter that they have further entertained two more contractors to bid for the project.
 We then did our own research on the competency of the contractors who were our competitors at the time and we were convinced that they did not have the appropriate experience of either designing or constructing such projects which was one of the main requirements laid in the tender document. Meanwhile we were cracking on with the initial design calculations and preparing the bid documents which almost took two months to compile as we had to furnish various requirements one of which was to supply a barge with a electro-mechanical arm to clean the debris from the weir which we proposed and had to import from a company in Michigan USA.
We submitted our technical and price bid documents in July 2008. We were confident that we will win the project and deliver the project as a example showing highest quality of work. However to our surprise we were notified that we were not successful because our price was slightly higher than the other contractor.
We have received confirmation from our sources in Kashmir that the contractor has never been involved with such projects and clearly doesn't have the competency which can be checked from the contractors work history. We have also been told by our sources that the contractor was given some vital technical information which we had produced in our technical bid document. This made things very clear that the departmental engineers were involved in illegally stealing information from our technical bid document and furnishing those to the contractor who won the project
It is saddening that for monetary gains our engineers are indulging in corruption and forgetting the safety of the people. It could have been a major disaster if the weir was loaded at its full capacity and failed which could have created a huge wave of water and could have been fatal for the house boat dwellers living down stream or people living by the banks.
Raja Narwari
Structural Engineer
(London)
farhan_raja1980@yahoo.co.uk

Lastupdate on : Thu, 16 Jun 2011 21:30:00 Makkah time
Lastupdate on : Thu, 16 Jun 2011 18:30:00 GMT
Lastupdate on : Fri, 17 Jun 2011 00:00:00 IST