[Inset your Picture Caption] Bintulu:The Rural Development Ministry has assured that a more effective system relating to the cost estimations on upgrading and maintenance of minor rural road projects will be introduced particularly in Sarawak, Member of Parliament for Bintulu Tiong King Sing said today. He said the Ministry would also increase the number of consultants in assessing and carrying out cost estimations on upgrading and maintenance of rural road projects in view of the fact that Sarawak is a larger State as compared to the states in the Peninsular. "Presently, there are only three consultants working on almost all assessment and cost estimations' work of the upgrading and maintenance projects for minor rural road projects in Sarawak," he said, in reference to the reply by Rural Development Ministry parliamentary-secretary Hajah Rohani Abdul Karim at the recent Parliament session. Tiong had asked the Rural Development Minister whether the Ministry realized that the integrated concept for minor rural projects in Sarawak especially in Bintulu is ineffective of which there is a recurrence of underestimation in costs for the projects. Tiong said Hajah Rohani had admitted that there were such problems in Sarawak but she assured that the Ministry had taken necessary actions to overcome the problem. "One of them is to ensure site assessment work carried out by consultants is more detailed while considering the views and the needs of the local residents involved in the project," he said. Tiong said the Ministry had appealed to project applicants including the State agencies to render precise and exact cost estimations when submitting applications and the Ministry had already directed State agencies to put the cost estimation for every one-kilometer of road to be built. He said the Ministry had been strict in ensuring that any implementing contractor who had been given the tender or the project but failed to carry out as stipulated in the contract, would be blacklisted. He said at the same time, the Ministry had a waitlist of contractors who will be awarded the job directly without having to incur other costs. "It is usual in the practices of farming out rural road projects, there are the main contractors and there are the implementing contractors. If the first implementing contractor cannot carry out his job well for a reason or cause, the Ministry will not immediately blacklist his. "The Ministry will then acknowledge the contractor's problem and subsequently award the project to the second implementing contractor and so on. But if the same contractor continuously fails to carry out the work as stipulated in the contract, he will then be blacklisted," he said. In an interjection for an additional question, Tiong asked Hajah Rohani whether the Ministry realised there are two rural road projects in his parliamentary area of Bintulu, which are underestimated. The first in Kampung Penan Muslim where the underestimation said to be about RM100,000 and the second in Kampung Datuk of which there was a gross underestimation of RM500,000. Tiong added that the road in Kampung Datuk was built on a private land and not on a road reserve and he wanted to know the actions the Ministry would take to overcome the problems in these two areas. At this juncture, Hajah Rohani admitted that they were the usual problems faced in Sarawak. "She said obviously there was no clear picture of the situation whenthe application for the project was made." "But when the consultants check, it is always found that the projects are underestimated or with a host of encumberances. There are times, the money allocated for maintenance is not sufficient or a particular road supposedly to be upgraded is not done so or otherwise," he said. Tiong said Hajah Rohani also urged the MPs, particularly in Sarawak to write to the Ministry so that problems such as these could be solved quickly.