The only electric crematorium of the city at Muktidham in Harmu locality that has been lying unattended for around seven years will be brought to life soon. A fresh tender has been invited by the Ranchi Municipal Corporation (RMC) to revive it and elected bidder will be allowed to reconstruct crematorium. According to Deputy Mayor of RMC Sanjeev Vijayvargiya, the bidder will be shortlisted and finalised within a month itself.
The crematorium was constructed with an investment of `1.4 crore to save environment, as load on wooden funeral pyres at muktidham was increasing day by day causing increasing air pollution nearby. But it couldn’t be able to cremate even a dozen dead bodies due to mechanical faults since it came into operation in 2008 and failed miserably to serve its purpose.
Now, a fresh tender inviting expression of interest (EoI) has been floated by the Municipal Corporation of Ranchi. The corporation is hopeful that the work of constructing a new crematorium will be awarded to a company, which will have proven record and expertise of running electric crematorium successfully one or more metro cities like Delhi or Mumbai.
The Deputy Mayor admitted that this non-functional crematorium has been a big failure yet. He cited a number of reasons responsible for this failure and said that the machinery installed there proved to be of poor quality and capacity. He said that he invited one company to repair it. But after the inspection, company backed out saying that the machinery had turned into scrap by then and it was next to impossible to repair it.
He said that a similar EoI was floated earlier also. But the bidder was not entertained, as it emerged as a single bidder. And it was not right to accept the bid of the only bidder at first time. “If this time again only one bidder appears, we will go ahead to award reconstruction work to that company, as it will not be illegal to accept bid of the only bidder second time ”, said Vijayvargeeya.
Construction of the crematorium that started in 2002 was handed over to Ranchi Regional Development Authority. The Authority then handed over responsibility of constructing crematorium to Font System, a privately held company. The crematorium was completed and it became functional in 2008. However, it was shut down after an incident that turned it non-functional.
It was in 2010 that a body was placed in the crematorium and generator could not take the load and the body was left half burnt. Since then, the power connection at the crematorium has been cut off. Vijayvargeeya
said that the corporation
had also written to the electricity department to waive off the unpaid bill of around `1.4 lakh.