Railway Projects: Costs overshoot by up to 260pc
Bangladesh Railway in October 2007 took up a project to construct a new station building in Khulna and enhance the operational capacity of the Benapole Station.The initial cost was set at Tk 40 crore and the estimated time for completion was two years.
However, when the authorities declared completion in December 2018 – a whole nine and a half years after the original deadline – it was found that some works still remained incomplete.
In the meantime, the project cost escalated to Tk 93.90 crore – 113 percent higher than the original estimate.
This is not a lone incident of BR's poor performance in project implementation.
As a matter of fact, 12 out of its 13 projects completed in the 2018-19 fiscal year saw time extensions ranging from five months to nine and a half years, according to a government evaluation report.
Four of those projects were for feasibility studies.
