BIA's Terminal 2 delays: jinx or blessing in disguise?

When it was conceptualized in 2012, the rationale for T2 was that the six million annual passenger capacity of Terminal 1 (T1) would not be able to serve the 14 million passengers expected by 2020.

- BY PRIANKA NALIN SENEVIRATNE, PHD, PE fessor of Civil Engineering and Team Leader (Retd.) Utah State University and Asian Development Bank

Accordingly, Sri Lanka borrowed JPY 74 billion (JPY 29 billion in 2012 and JPY 45 billion in 2016) from Japan, mainly to design and construct the 185,900 sqm T2 with a nine million passenger annual capacity, and to increase the total capacity of BIA to 15 million passengers by November 2019.

However, this project has taken many twists and turns since then. AASL and the government took 19 months after the design was completed and 52 months after the second loan agreement was signed to award the $357 million civil works contract in July 2020. The selected contractor, Japan's Taisei Corporation, began the works in December 2020, despite COVID-19 restrictions and supply chain disruptions, which only eased in June 2021. Then came the debt crisis in early 2022 and subsequent price escalations.

Japan suspended the $405m project loan in July 2022. The contractor suspended the works in December 2022 and terminated the contract in mid-2023. By then, the original time for completion had almost elapsed, but only six percent of the works was completed. The slow progress is attributed to COVID-19 and events such as the engineer rejecting the subcontractor proposed by Taisei in July 2021. Nevertheless, according to the subcontractor's company website, it completed the "first platform foundation" in November 2021.