It looks like Calcutta will have to pass an opportunity to doll up itself. A project to lay sewers, spruce up parks and squares, develop slums and construct scores of small bridges, with a huge loan already released by the Asian Development Bank, could well fall through.

On Sunday, civic officers said bureaucratic sniping and political squabbles at the Calcutta Municipal Corporation (CMC) were holding up utilisation of the Rs 1,518-crore loan, earmarked for use by 2007 under the Calcutta Environment Improvement Project.

The future of the project is bleak, admitted officers, as pressure groups within the CMC, comprising top-level bureaucrats, engineers and politicians, are blocking the process of awarding contracts on various pretexts.

?The project is near-collapse and will soon be beyond repair. One does not have to look far for reasons,? said a senior officer, on condition of anonymity. ?Under a year-and-a-half, we will be required to spend several hundred crores on laying sewers, constructing bridges, lifting pumping stations, re-excavating drainage outflow channels, rehabilitating canal-side settlers, developing slums, upgrading the garbage disposal system and those for drainage and sewerage. Going by the present pace of work, it is an impossible task.?

The sorry state of the project can be gauged from the fact that tenders worth Rs 311 crore, decided seven months ago in favour of large companies, have been kept in abeyance without informing either the Centre or the donor bank, because a tussle has begun between project officers and engineers and their counterparts in the CMC.

On paper, the CMC has nothing to do with the loan utilisation. A separate office under a full-fledged director is mandated to execute the project.

However, under Subrata Mukherjee, CMC officers and engineers remote-controlled execution of the project ? a trend that continues even after a new team under mayor Bikash Bhattacharjee took over.

?I am disturbed at the discovery that work orders worth Rs 300 crore, all settled and ready for award, are in cold storage. After a meeting on the state of the project last week, I was not happy. We have to save this project at any cost,? mayor Bhattacharya said.

Among the companies that have secured the contracts are large entities like Engineering Projects India Ltd, Nagarjuna Construction, Ramkey Infrastructure, Tantia Construction and Simplex Concrete Piles.