Govt. to spend $221M more to repair Canal Nos. 1 & 2 main roads

Dec 18, 2022 News

Phase Two of rehabilitation works to the Canal No.1 main access road. (Photo courtesy, Canal Polder NDC Facebook page)

Kaieteur News – The Ministry of Public Works will be spending an additional $221,841,060 to continue its rehabilitation of the Canal Nos. 1 and 2 West Bank Demerara (WBD) main roads.
Recently, the Ministry signed two new contracts at its Kingston, Georgetown office to complete Phase Three of the rehabilitation projects. The contracts were signed with R&B Investment Inc. contracted to complete phase three of Canal No. 1 main road to the tune of $103,520,235, and AJM Enterprise contracted to complete Phase Three of Canal No. 2 road to the sum of 118,320,825.
Rehabilitation of the main roads began in 2021 with Phase One of the projects being awarded in September to complete the roads in the farming communities. As part of efforts to continue the upgrade of the access roads this year, two more contracts worth $192, 181,710 were awarded to complete Phase Two of the projects.
These two new additional contracts, when calculated show that a total of $757,767,417 is being spent by the Public Works Ministry to do rehabilitative works on these two roads.
Back in April, the National Procurement and Tender Administration Board (NPTAB) office on its website had revealed that R&B Investment Inc. secured the contract to execute works for Phase Two of the Canal No.1 road for $99,000,300 while Navin & Son Construction was awarded the $ 93,181,410 contract to work on Phase Two of Canal No. 2 road.
Kaieteur News previously reported that already $343,794,647 was spent on the first phase of these roads. In September 2021, two contractors, Japarts Construction Inc. and Aronco Services Inc. were awarded contracts to upgrade the first phase of the roads.
Reports are that Japarts was awarded $173,131,854 to work on Canal No. 1 and Aronco to work on Canal No. 2 main access road for the sum of $170,612,793.
The new projects would form part of the $15.2B that was allocated in this year’s budget for the construction and rehabilitation of urban and community roads across the country.
Meanwhile, during the signing of the contracts for phase three of the projects, Minister of Public Works, Juan Edghill had noted of the importance of having these road works completed.
Edghill asserted that work must begin immediately. “Nobody is going to sign a contract and park until next year. We don’t rest until we got our work done,” the Minister said.
The Minister also made an appeal for contractors to continue engaging residents in communities they are working in.