GVMC Contractors Welfare Association members staging a protest demanding clearing of pending bills near the corporation office in Visakhapatnam on Monday. | Photo Credit: V RAJU
Contractors, suppliers and other teams associated with the Greater Visakhapatnam Municipal Corporation (GVMC) Contractors Welfare Association, staged a protest near the GVMC office on Monday, demanding immediate clearance of pending bills amounting to nearly ₹460 crore for government development works executed between January and September 2026.
During the protest, general secretary of the GVMC Contractors Welfare Association, Sanjeev Reddy said that bills worth around ₹460 crore pertaining to works executed from January to September had been certified by the concerned executive and assistant engineers, but were stalled due to technical glitches and system-related bottlenecks in uploading the bills on the NIDHI portal under the CFMS/State Financial Management system.
The contractors said they were facing repeated server timeouts, legacy bill-mapping rejections and validation failures while attempting to upload the bills pertaining to works executed during the nine-month period.
They said the prolonged non-clearance of bills had created a severe working capital crisis for contractors, who were under pressure from bank interest, equipment rentals, material payments and other operational liabilities.
With the Dasara festival approaching, the protesters expressed concern over the difficulties being faced by site workers, skilled tradesmen, machine operators and material suppliers awaiting their dues. They said the delay in payments could affect worker’s ability to meet their household and festival-related expenses.
They sought a system patch to address the portal glitches and requested the authorities to provide an emergency mechanism, including offline token generation or a temporary manual processing window, to process the pending 2026 bills. They also sought provisional token generation and treasury clearance of the bills so that the pending amounts could be released before the Dasara festival.
The contractors said immediate clearance of the dues would provide relief to hundreds of workers and their families dependent on the payments.
Published - October 05, 2026 08:40 pm IST