Construction of National pride project Gautam Buddha international Airport (GBIA) project has resumed fully from Wednesday.
The work was restarted as around 100 million rupees was provided by Civil Aviation Authority (CAAN) which could be reimbursed later. The finance was directly provided in construction company bank account.
The project head Prabesh Adhikari stated that the money was provided to the company and the company has started all work from Wednesday onward. The final stage of blacktopping the runway has also started with the payment of the finance.
Some works were resumed from Monday after government had decided to release around 700 million budgets for the project.
China’s Northwest Civil Aviation Airport Construction Group had stopped construction work saying that the company has not received the payment of previously completed work. The project also faced hindrance as Butwal Sub-Metropolitan City did not supply gravel and sand at the old rate and prevented the project from extracting riverbed materials.
However, after allocation of budget by government and pressure from various stakeholders to make Butwal sub-municipality to provide raw materials at agreed price led to resumption of the project.
The work is set to take momentum gradually and CAAN will initiate the second phase of the project which involves installing the equipment (ICB 02), after the infrastructural work (ICB 01) completes.
Now the work is being paced up so as to start test flight from the airport after a month and half.
The project was awarded to China’s Northwest Civil Aviation Airport Construction Group in November 2013 for NRs. 6.22 Billion and was expected to be completed by the end of 2017.
The airport will be the country’s second international airport and is expected to minimize the traffic congestion of Tribhuvan International Airport (TIA).
