Hyderabad: While the Telangana government is leaving no stone unturned for the speedy completion of the Water Grid project, there is almost no response from major contractors to take up the project that is valued at Rs 25,000 crore over five years.

When tenders were invited, only inexperienced and small-time contractors evinced interest. The TS government is trying to lure big contractors — who can deliver the project on time to take up the job.

The Water Grid is the most important project among all the schemes announced by the TRS government with Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao making an announcement in the Legislative Assembly in November 2014. He had said that the TRS would not contest in the next Assembly elections in 2019, if it failed to deliver on the Water Grid project by then.

To achieve this goal, the TS government even issued an ordinance on Saturday to give the right of way for laying water pipelines spread over 1.27 lakh km and ensure that there is no delay in acquiring land owned by private individuals and various other government agencies for the purpose.

However, the early execution of work has been posing a major challenge for the government. The government issued tenders to take up works worth Rs 1,000 crore in the first phase on February 14. The deadline ended on February 19.

When it opened the tenders, it was shocked to find that only small-time and inexperienced contractors had submitted the bids and there were no bids from major contractors experienced in taking up projects of this scale.

The government abruptly cancelled those tenders without any notice and decided to issue fresh tenders with new norms and specifications to weed out inexperienced contractors.

Meanwhile, the Jindal Group, the country’s largest producer of pipes, evinced interest in supplying pipes for the Water Grid. Its CEO Neeraj Kumar also met Mr Rao and submitted the proposal. Interestingly, the decision to cancel previous tenders was taken on the same day when Mr Kumar met Mr Rao.