ODA highways to hit top gear

In his first 2013 message, Minister of Transport Dinh La Thang required transport sector project developers to keep up the pace of official development assistance (ODA) capital projects.

Particularly, besides two big northern highway projects with construction due to be finalised by December 2013, the Ministry of Transport (MoT) asked developers under its management to kick-off construction of another 11 ODA-funded projects with investment capital of nearly $6 billion.

Two northern highway projects slated for completion before end of 2013 are the 245 kilometre long Noi Bai-Lao Cai expressway valued at VND19.998 trillion ($952 million) funded by Asian Development Bank (ADB) with Vietnam Expressway Corporation (VEC) as the developer and the 60km long four-lane Hanoi-Thai Nguyen expressway with investment surpassing VND10 trillion ($476 million), funded by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA).

“With available capital, three mammoth ODA highway projects, the $1.3 billion Danang-Quang Ngai expressway, the 1.5 billion Ben Luc-Long Thanh expressway and $571 million Tan Vu-Lach Huyen motorway will bring huge work volumes to transport sector contractors in 2013,” said head of MoT’s Transport Engineering Construction and Quality Management Bureau Tran Xuan Sanh.

In light of Resolution 02/NQ-CP dated January 7, 2013 with several measures to tackle difficulties in production-business, support market and clear bad debts, implementation of ODA projects was particularly upheld by the MoT.
Accordingly, from late 2012 contractors at some ODA projects were advanced an additional 10 per cent contract value and got payment of 80 per cent of material costs at construction sites.

Efforts were also made to shorten payment process to alleviate contractors’ financial woes.

The MoT estimated if Vietnamese reciprocal capital needs were satisfactorily met, transport sector ODA projects could reach capital disbursement volume of VND40 trillion ($1.9 billion) in 2013, creating huge workloads, contributed to ensuring social order and security.