The Qom Monorail: A 220 Billion Toman Incomplete Project
The Qom Monorail project was intended to develop urban transportation and reduce traffic in Qom. The project started in 2009 and was planned to be completed by 2011. The railway was intended to be built in two phases for a total of 18 kilometers (km). The first phase was about 7 km with 5 stations.
The project has since become a symbol of Iranian government’s corruption and mismanagement of funds. When the project began, during the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, implementation was slow. After the construction of the main columns and other structures near the Hazrat Masoumeh Holy Shrine, disputes regarding construction of the monorail in the Qom City Council escalated and the future of the project became uncertain.
Following the end of Ahmadinejad’s presidency, the incomplete monorail lost government support and Qom’s municipal government inherited the burden of completing the project.
After over a decade, construction of the Qom monorail had come to a complete standstill. The remnants of the project are a few columns and unfinished train stations. Roughly 220 billion toman had been spent on the project. The cost of the project up to now is equivalent to a quarter of the City of Qom’s 2011 annual budget.
The project’s general contractor is the 104 Hira Engineering Group; one of the engineering “battalions” of the Khatam al-Anbiya Headquarters of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
Project Contractors
According to the Qom Urban Railway Organization website, the signed contract is between a consortium of providers consisting of the MAPNA Group, Kayson Inc. and the Qom Urban Railway Organization.
Construction of the Qom monorail is an engineering-procurement-construction (EPC), or “turnkey”, contract. This means that all stages of design, construction, and execution are the contractor’s responsibility.
Turnkey projects allow for quicker completion of construction projects. As a result, they are a popular option in the world’s major industries. On the other hand, since project management, implementation, and quality control are the responsibility of the contractor, in a country like Iran with high levels of financial and administrative corruption, turnkey projects enable and facilitate financial exploitation.
MAPNA Group
The Iran Power Plant Project Management Company, also known as MAPNA (P abbreviation) was established in 1993 by the Ministry of Energy. According to the company’s website, the MAPNA Group is a knowledge-based industrial company operating in power, oil and gas infrastructure, rail transportation and health fields as a turnkey contractor and private investment. MAPNA consists of 39 subsidiaries and, according to the company, has completed 100 projects, with a total estimated value at over 30 billion euros. In 2015, Astan Quds Razavi, a wealthy charitable trust organization that manages the Imam Reza Holy Shrine joined MAPNA and, along with Saba Electrical and Water Industries Investment Company and Keramat Capital Management Company, became one of the group’s most prominent shareholders.
Other incomplete projects not unlike the Qom monorail can be visited on the MAPNA Group website. These projects include the Karaj City Train, the Isfahan Tram and the first line of the Isfahan City Train.
MAPNA is also active in international projects related to the Revolutionary Guard. One such example is the construction of a 162-megawatts natural gas power plant in Heydariyeh, Najaf, in Iraq. This project was commissioned in 2015 by the order of the Holy Shrines' Reconstruction Headquarters.
Other subsidiaries of MAPNA also have ongoing international projects. Iran Open Data has already published, in a separate article, recipients of subsidized USD (equivalent to 4200 toman) in the period between April 2018 and May 2020. The table below shows four subsidiaries of MAPNA, receiving more than $3,000,000 USD.
Kayson Company
Kayson Inc. is a private company based in Tehran. It was founded in 1974. Company executives describe it as "Iran's largest private sector company".
Kayson Inc. provides construction and engineering services in five areas: oil and gas, dam and water resources management, construction and housing, and transportation infrastructures such as roads and railways. The company's international projects include several large construction projects in Iraq, construction of a 10,000-unit housing complex in Venezuela, as well as other projects in many other countries throughout Africa and Central Asia.
The Ahvaz Urban Rail project is another incomplete railway project associated with Kayson Inc. The contract was signed, in 2006, with Norinco, a Chinese-based corporation that specializes in road construction and defense. It is considered one of the largest defense contractors in the world.
On at least two separate occasions, Kayson has not paid its employees’ dues. The unpaid wages led to the Kayson employees strike in the Mubarak Mountain of Jask Oil Reservoirs project in March of 2017, and the protest rally of the employees of the Ahwaz Urban Rail project in 2009, when Kayson had not paid the salaries and benefits of its employees for more than a year.
Final Status of Qom Monorail and Other Similar Projects
The most important question to be asked about the Qom Monorail project is why a monorail was chosen in the first place. Given the track type and large column and bridge construction within an urban environment, construction of the monorail would cost anywhere between 30 million and 50 million USD per kilometer. On the other hand, the average cost of constructing a subway line with at least 5 times the passenger capacity is about 50 million USD per kilometer. Other disadvantages of the monorail system include higher maintenance costs and greater difficulty in providing emergency services in case of an incident.
The first phase of the Qom railway project was never completed. The project started with an initial budget of 180 billion toman in 2009. A decade later, 220 billion toman has been spent on the project. Prior to construction coming to a halt, the contractors estimated a cost of 750 billion toman to complete the project.
The Qom monorail project is not the first example of a monorail construction project that was cancelled before its completion. In 2003, when former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was Tehran’s mayor, a plan to build a monorail line connecting the residential districts Sadeghieh and Ekbatan was proposed. In 2005, two years later, with 52 billion toman of the city’s funds having already been invested into the project, construction came to a halt. In 2009, the city of Kermanshah’s subway project was abandoned in favor of the Kermanshah monorail project. After numerous changes, the project has yet to be completed. Considering the outcomes of the Qom and Tehran monorail projects, it is likely that the Kermanshah monorail will end up becoming another construction project that will never see completion.
This article was originally published in Persian (available here).
