It would have to meet the completion deadline: there was no leeway.
Now the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, which determines eligibility for the abatement, wants to extend the completion deadline by three years, in the hopes of jump-starting construction.
It has not been finished, although officials claim it will be ready for the completion deadline on 1 July and will transport more than 300,000 people each day and significantly alleviate traffic problems in Rio.
That was when the authority signed off on the 2007 completion deadline.
However, several unforeseen complications have pushed back the final completion deadline to 2017 at the earliest so a through service from central India to Kashmir will not be possible till then.
The process took five years and was delayed approximately ten months in relation to the original completion deadline.
The number of projects for which cost estimates had at least doubled in five years and completion deadlines had slipped by at least five years had increased to 38percentt.
This situation is mainly the result of erratic government policies, with scant monitoring of measures once they are started, short planning horizons, and projects, sometimes abandoned even before their completion deadlines.
But critics of the proposed change, among them Councilman Brad Lander, said that many of the stalled sites were owned by speculators and that the three-year completion deadline should remain in place.
With that uncertainty in mind, the panel also recommended that the project's five-year completion deadline be dropped.
