Chandigarh Municipal Corporation Seeks Private Companies for Property Management

                Chandigarh: The worst-ever financial crisis in the Chandigarh municipal corporation (MC) has started to affect not only new initiatives, but is posing a serious challenge in the 
maintenance of its existing assets.
The MC is now looking to private entities to maintain its properties. In a first such move, the civic body has floated an expression of interest (EOI) to hire interested bidders to maintain its 
five newly built community centres on a public private partnership (PPP) basis and make its 15 gyms functional, which are located in different sectors.
Besides, the MC is also going to give the work to construct a new community centre in Sector 51 and also to make proper use of the 280-kilometre-long constructed underground duct in 
the city to lay down multiple service lines to private bidders. The community centres identified to be given for maintenance and running are the community centres of sectors 37, 38 
(West), 40, 49, and 50.
Since the EOI has already been floated by multiple divisions of the MC's engineering department, the paperwork and related process are expected to be completed by the end of this 
month. The MC did tedious paperwork to prepare the terms and conditions for initiating this first-of-its-kind exercise, so that clarity should be there between the MC and the bidder while 
maintaining and running the MC's properties.
In the community centre EOI, the interested parties will be asked to book, operate, and maintain the community centres and take the earnings out of that. The bidder will give the 
concession fee to the MC. The concession period will be 20 years, which will be extendable for another five years.
Moreover, for running around 15 gyms in the MC's community centres, the interested bidder will develop the gyms properly to make them in proper workable conditions, operate them, 
install all the necessary equipment for the members, and also carry out the repair work. The bidder will collect user charges of the gym as its revenue. In case of the gyms, the period of 
the contract will be three years, which will be extended for two years further as per the performance and working of the hired bidder.

Source : Times of India