Railways cancels Rs 471 crore contract with Chinese firm

The “Boycott China” campaign is gaining momentum after the Galwan Valley incident. The Indian Railways has cancelled the contract awarded to Beijing National Railway Research and Design Institute of Signal and Communication Group, though it says the move has nothing to do with the recent India-China face-off in the Ladakh region. This Chinese company was awarded the contract to build the KanpurDeen Dayal Upadhyay section, a 417-km-long corridor.

The Railways awarded this contract in June 2016 for Rs 471 crore and only 20 percent of the total work had been completed in the last four years. Though the reason for the cancellation was technical, the timing was all political. As per the company agreement, technical documents such as logic design and electronic interlocking had not been submitted for this project. Also, no engineer or officer of the company was available on site.

There was a possibility of delay in work as the company had not yet entered into an agreement with any local agency. So it was impossible to speed up the work. The Indian Railways also said several meetings were held with the company officials and despite being repeatedly made aware of the problems they did not pay attention to it.