LAHORE, June 3: The federal government has selected 12 international firms for the installation of filtration plants in around 6,585 union councils in the country, planning to invite tenders by the end of the current month, official sources informed Dawn on Sunday.

They said the 12 companies had been selected out of nearly 100 and the contract for the filtration plants would be awarded most probably during the first week of July.

The plants would be installed by March 2008 as had been promised with President Gen Pervez Musharraf. “We will proceed carefully because a lot of money is involved in this highly-technical project,” they said.

Sources said a budget of Rs15.8 billion had been approved for the project, but the authorities hoped to save a lot of money because of the lessons learnt in the installation of the filtration plants at the tehsil level.

They made it clear that the provincial governments would only supervise the installation process. They confirmed that the plants could not be installed in all the 455 tehsils in the second phase of the multi-billion project. Many of the installed plants were found faulty.

There are 144 tehsils in Punjab, but they all had been given the plants only in the recent past.

“The implementation of the phase was stopped because of these problems. But we will install the plants in the remaining tehsils. We have learnt a lot from the faults and will see that the situation is not repeated in future,” they said.

Sources said the federal government had also planned to install the plants in the villages having a population of more than 1,000 in the next phase. There were 29,000 villages in Punjab all of which would have plants because each had a population of over 1,000, they said.