Dubai Electricity & Water Authority (Dewa) has received bids from 17 companies for the contract to build the first two phases of its 120-million-gallon Ghafat reservoir.

The low bidder is India’s Pratibha Industries which bid AED286m ($78m), which is 13 per cent lower than the next-lowest price of AED329m submitted by the local United Engineering Construction.

Four other companies bid less than AED400m. They were Kuwait Company for Process Plant Construction & Contracting at AED378m, the UAE’s Essa Engineering Marine Services at AED388m, Iran’s Tossar Construction Company at AED394m, and the UAE’s Mammut Construction Group at AED398m.

Dewa had already tendered the contract once before. In March, it received bids from 12 companies, but in June it decided to retender the deal in the hope of getting better prices from contractors (MEED 4:6:09).

In 2008, Dewa awarded a AED620m contract to expand the capacity of the Mushrif water reservoir by 180 million gallons to Mammut Building Systems.