According to an inquiry report on Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation’s (BMC) pre-monsoon desilting works in the city, more than 70 per cent of the desilting works carried out by the contractors are bogus.
The final report was submitted to civic chief Ajoy Mehta on Thursday and will be presented to the standing committee members on Friday. With the shoddy works carried out by contractors exposed in the report, the BMC is expected to take action against
all 32 contractors, who were given desilting works worth Rs 150 crore. Commenting on the report, a senior civic official said, “There were gross irregularities in the entries made by contractors. For example, one vehicle was shown at two different silt-removal sites at the same time. The number of trips made by the vehicles transporting the silt is not matching with the entries by contractors.”
The scam is deemed to be enormous the contractors have even failed to provide details of their silt-carrying vehicles during the inquiry. The civic body has also reportedly indicted 20 civic officials for their alleged involvement in the scam.
BMC’s inquiry report says that more than 70 per cent of the entries made by contractors while transporting silt to the dump sites outside the city have been found to be bogus.
The civic body had made it compulsory on every contractor to install a vehicle-tracking system (VTS) on their vehicles used to transport silt. But they could not provide the VTS details of their vehicles during the probe. It has been found that the contractors of VTS, weighing and desilting works prepared fake documents in connivance with each other and duped the BMC financially.
The city had witnessed flooding with a majority of areas going under water during the heavy rains on June 18-19. Due to this, the BMC had instituted an inquiry into the desilting works of city nullahs, which were done before monsoon. The report had blamed errant contractors for carrying out shoddy desilting works. The civic chief then directed additional municipal commissioner Sanjay Deshmukh to carry out a detailed probe. For this, all documents related to desilting works were seized.
The civic body has already suspended 14 civic officials — including chief engineer (vigilance) Uday Murudkar, six sub engineers, four assistant engineers and three supervisors – for the dereliction of duty in failing to inspect the desilting works.
