EDUCATION Minister Priya Manickchand has warned that her ministry will be taking a strong stance against inadequacies of contractors and other persons who are hired to do work and fail to deliver.
She said the Ministry will be moving, from now, to apply liquidated damages for every single day that a contract is delayed.
Ms. Manickchand said, when contractors bid and promise to deliver a certain quality of work within a certain time, they must stick to those commitments.
Failure to do so will see them being marched to the Courts where the Ministry of Education would be applying for all the penalties that the contract would allow to be applied against errant contractors, she indicated.
The Minister said it is hoped that the Ministry will be sending a strong message to all other contractors when it makes the first errant one an example.
Manickchand declared that it is almost criminal for a small developing country like Guyana to be paying so much of monies to build educational infrastructures and end up with finished products that cannot be considered value for money.
She said when contractors bid for projects and promise that they can complete jobs within a specific timeframe, for a specific sum of money and fail in that bid, it becomes a burden to the persons who are expected to benefit from the finished projects.
Her comments were made while visiting Diamond Primary School, East Bank Demerra, on Monday where it was discovered that an entire section of the building was not outfitted with windows, despite the period under which the construction was in progress.
She said she was informed that the contractor claimed his inability to install the windows was because the shipment was on a boat that did not arrive in Guyana on schedule.
The Minister said, from now, for every major project that the Ministry awards to a contractor, the details and bills of quantity along with other specifics of the projects will be posted up at strategic locations in the communities where they are being executed.
It is believed that such a move will see the community being able to monitor the projects and, where necessary or wherever they feel that the government and, by extension, the taxpayers are being shortchanged, they will inform the Ministry.
Source: http://guyanachronicle.com/2012/09/05/manickchand-warns-contractors-of-penalties-for-failures