Standard Critical Path and Selection of Most Economic and Quality Contractors for Construction of Thermal Power Plant: A Case Study in NTPC

In India, most of the thermal power plants were built by National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC) Ltd and different state electricity boards. The thumb rule indicates that out of the total project construction cost, 70 per cent goes to the cost of project materials, while 30 per cent goes to the cost construction work which leads us to select the most competitive material suppliers and construction contractors. The objectives of this research work are (a) to select a contractor based on cost economy, (b) to find out the standard critical path for constructing a thermal power plant, and (c) to identify the critical activities in constructing a 500 MW thermal power plant. Through literature review, six important factors were identified to judge the quality of the contractor before awarding the contract. In project management, the selection of contractor on the basis of probability of their performance comes within the purview of decision under risk, and hence decision tree has been used as a methodology for the selection of contractor. For computing the critical path, the project network for the construction of the thermal power plant was constructed. The five thermal power projects of NTPC—NTPC Korba, NTPC Talcher, NTPC Rihand, NTPC Sipat, and NTPC Simhadri—were considered, and the construction data of these five projects were used to compute the critical path. Since the completion data of different activities of five projects at different geographical locations with different climates, different site conditions, and different conglomerate of workers were used, so the critical path estimated was accepted as the standard critical path.