LAHORE, June 13: The Punjab Stadium is unlikely to be completed in the near future as the pace of the construction work on the project remains unsatisfactory due to the reasons best known to the planners. The stadium is being built at the Nishtar Park, in front of the Gaddafi Stadium and the National Hockey Stadium.

The Punjab government has given Rs 110 million for the project to the Lahore Development Authority (LDA) before the start of the work. The project started in 1999 with a claim that the opening ceremony of the 28th National Games-2000 will be held in it.

The LDA had awarded the contract to the NLC.

A football ground with a tartan track for the athletics events are the two major parts of the stadium. Both the facilities are to be the first of their kinds in Punjab.

The NLC after failing to complete the stadium before the commencement of the National Games, got an extension upto Oct 30, 2001. B

ut the NLC could not meet the deadline again despite there was no financial constraints. The new date was set as April 2002 which had also been passed. There is no hope for its early completion as far as the speed of construction work is concerned.

The project had also suffered because the NLC was to hand over the project to another private company after the tense situation at the Eastern borders.

It was learnt that the LDA had also imposed a penalty of six lakh rupees on the NLC for causing delay.

To further delay the project the Punjab Sports Board (PSB) had yet to open a letter of credit to import a tartan track. An amount of Rs 350 million is lying with the PSB to import the track.

A PSB spokesman said that the letter of credit was not opened because the tartan track would be costly under the present circumtances of the region.

He said that the rate of insurance on all the import items had been increased after Pakistan was included in risk zone in the wake of the Sept 11 attacks.

However, in this regard the loss due to high insurance rate is very much less than to a benefit which could be utilised due to a fall in the price of US Dollars which has been cut down from Rs 68 each to Rs 60.