Resh­ma Ra­goonath

With over $1.6 bil­lion worth of projects in train, in­ter­im Wa­ter and Sew­er­age Au­thor­i­ty CEO, Dion Ab­dool, yes­ter­day said the pub­lic util­i­ty was open for busi­ness, call­ing on in­dus­try lead­ers to seize op­por­tu­ni­ties open to them. Ab­dool, ad­dress­ing an En­er­gy Cham­ber break­fast meet­ing yes­ter­day at Cara Suites, Clax­ton Bay, said there were many busi­ness op­por­tu­ni­ties on of­fer at WASA for pri­vate com­pa­nies, rang­ing from big projects, pro­vid­ing ma­te­ri­als and con­struc­tion. He told at­ten­dees at the meet­ing, themed "Busi­ness Op­por­tu­ni­ties at WASA", that "the in­ten­tion is to tell you how you can do busi­ness with?WASA." WASA projects, he said, were op­por­tu­ni­ties for the pri­vate sec­tor to part­ner with the util­i­ty which was set to em­bark up­on sev­er­al projects that would be open for ten­der­ing. "There is a lot of work to be done and WASA is open for busi­ness," he said.

Ab­dool point­ed to the San Fer­nan­do sew­er ex­pan­sion project as a ma­jor busi­ness op­por­tu­ni­ty. The pub­lic util­i­ty had ap­proached the In­ter-Amer­i­can De­vel­op­ment Bank (IDB) for $600 mil­lion in fund­ing for the project which would bring re­lief to res­i­dents in San Fer­nan­do, he said. He added: "The fund­ing is be­ing put in place now. All the ap­provals have been re­ceived. The ef­fort is to re­al­ly de­vel­op the waste wa­ter sec­tor, par­tic­u­lar­ly in San Feran­do, cen­tral Trinidad and Ari­ma. "That process is well ad­vanced. The ap­proval process is al­most com­plet­ed. We ex­pect the re­lease of funds short­ly, then we be­gin con­sul­tan­cy and then the ac­tu­al work will be start­ed." Ab­dool ad­mit­ted that waste wa­ter sec­tor was "se­ri­ous­ly un­der­de­vel­oped. If you are pri­vate sec­tor, then this is the area you want to get in­to," he added. Strate­gic Plan­ning and In­vest­ment Man­age­ment head, Al­lan Poon King, ad­dress­ing the meet­ing, said there were some 360-plus projects ear­marked for WASA, to­tal­ing $1.6 bil­lion, and busi­ness­es were wel­comed to bid for them once they were reg­is­tered with?WASA.

Ab­dool said WASA was seek­ing to im­ple­ment new tech­nol­o­gy to en­sure the ef­fi­cien­cy of the or­gan­i­sa­tion's de­liv­ery of ser­vice. The util­i­ty, he said, was de­cen­tral­is­ing which would make con­duct­ing busi­ness with WASA less te­dious and more cus­tomer-friend­ly. He added: "What we have de­cid­ed to do is to de­cen­tralise. We have sev­en re­gions: To­ba­go, North West, North East, North Cen­tral, South West, South East and?South Cen­tral. "With re­gion­al­i­sa­tion and de­cen­tral­i­sa­tion we are push­ing the ser­vices to the cus­tomers, to the com­mu­ni­ties." Each re­gion, he ex­plained, would have au­ton­o­my, which meant cus­tomers would not have to go to WASA's head of­fice in St Joseph to trans­act busi­ness since all ser­vices would be of­fered at re­gion­al of­fices. "We crunch the process and re­move the bot­tle­neck­ing that oc­curs and we give the cus­tomer the op­por­tu­ni­ty to help us go for­ward," Ab­dool said. The ob­jec­tive, he added, was to make WASA a "high-per­for­mance util­i­ty."