By OUR STAFF REPORTER
DEHRADUN, 18 Dec: For its Disaster Recovery Project, Uttarakhand has got approval for additional financing of 120 million dollars from the World Bank. A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in this regard between Uttarakhand Government and the World Bank was signed at a programme organised in New Delhi on Tuesday
As part of the Uttarakhand Disaster Recovery Project (UDRP), which began with 250 million dollars financing, the World Bank has agreed to provide additional financing of 120 million dollars.
With this extra funding, mainly training facilities of the SDRF and construction of battalion headquarters at Jolly Grant, construction of an ultra-modern Uttarakhand State Disaster Management Authority building, construction of 64 bridges to improve connectivity in Uttarakhand, slope security work on 15 highly sensitive landslide zones and security work at 5 places on river banks will be done. All these works are proposed to be completed in the next three years.
The preparations on the project were started a year ago at the instructions of Chief Minister Trivendra Singh Rawat. The work on preparing a few DPRs has been done under UDRP. Through the medium of PMU, PIU and Regional PIU, the implementation of the project work will be done with the coordination of Public Works Department, Irrigation Department and Police Department under USDMA. The monitoring of the project will be done by a high level committee set up under the chairmanship of the Chief Secretary. Initial human resource and Regional PIU for the project has been set up and 30 per cent of the contract has been done as per the guidelines of the Department of Economic Affairs.
Present at the programme organised in New Delhi on Tuesday were Secretary Amit Singh Negi, Additional Secretary Savin Bansal, Director Bandana Preyashi, Under Secretary Department of Economic Affairs, SC Srivastav, World Bank’s Ignacio Urrutia, Deepak Singh, etc.
After the 2013 disaster in Uttarakhand, the Department of Disaster Management had got assistance of 250 million dollars for UDRP from the World Bank and 200 million dollars assistance from the Asian Development Bank under the Uttarakhand Emergency Assistance Project (UEAP). UEAP has been successfully completed in October 2017 and the UDRP is likely to be completed by June 2019. Under the above-mentioned projects, works on reconstruction of various roads and bridges, 25 public buildings (school, dispensary, police station, etc.), rehabilitation and construction of tourism infrastructure under GMVN and KMVN, construction of helipads, water supply work in 9 cities, supply of search and rescue equipment to SDRF, various technical studies, etc., were done.
