A survey by a BMC technical team of 34 road projects executed in the last three years has found them to be incomplete and substandard. The 12-member team that included engineers and vigilance officers has also found that these projects were certified by third-party quality auditors hired by civic body to carry out day-to-day checks, and private contractors who carried out these projects have been paid in full by the civic body.
For example, the survey found that a 60-mm metal layer foundation for a road project costing Rs 421.96 crore was never laid. In another instance, payments were collected by contractors for excavation of debris that was never done. This ‘debris’ was dumped in a non-existent lake.
The vigilance team’s interim report was submitted on April 1 after a random inspection of 34 road projects, including 17 that cost over Rs 5 crore. Discrepancies were found in almost all road projects.
“The Third Party Quality Auditors (TPQAs) have failed to perform their duties and have given wrong certification of work that has not been actually executed, allowing the contractors to claim and draw the amount for such unexecuted works,” the report states.
Big bills, poor work
While contractors did not submit bills in some cases, in others they submitted claims for works that were never carried out, the report states. For instance, contractors have billed the BMC for transport of excavated debris which wasn’t taken to civic-administered sites to be dumped. In fact, the survey found, no excavation had been done in 53 per cent of the projects surveyed.
In one of the cases highlighted in the report, a contractor claimed to have transported around 2.8 lakh cubic metres of debris from road sites to Kolke village in Panvel between March 1, 2014 and June 5, 2015. A team of BMC engineers sent to verify the facts found a plot of land at the site, dotted with a few trees. The contractor told officials the debris had been dumped into a private lake on the land due to which it had filled up and looked like a plain patch of land. The report says there is no mention of a lake in the land records.
The report notes, “In order to verify the genuineness of the claim, Google Earth maps of the site for the years 2010, 2012, 2014 and 2015 were obtained and no lake was seen. The plain ground with mature trees is seen for all the years.” It has also found that private firms roped in as TPQAs for day-to-day checks on ongoing projects have falsely certified these road projects, worth over Rs 1,400 crore, on a daily basis. The TPQAs were paid 0.85 per cent of the project cost as fees.
The report states that the TPQAs failed to do their job of monitoring and certifying work on a daily basis and at every stage of the project. The auditors can file a non-conformity report if they are dissatisfied with the work. If satisfied, they certify the request for inspection (RFI) and permit work on the next layer to begin. “Similarly, the procedure is to be followed for the remaining layers till the top layer is completed,” the report states.
BMC to crack down
Civic officials said the sample survey has revealed the failure of the public-private partnership (PPP) model in executing road contracts. BMC commissioner Ajoy Mehta has ordered five special teams to be set up, who will assess all road projects undertaken in the last four fiscal years to calculate the actual extent of the scam “perpetrated upon public money through the connivance of contractors, TPQAs and civic officials across the board”.
The BMC top brass has also ordered the suspensions of some BMC officials and blacklisting of private contractors and TPQAs. Officials said they would also be lodging police complaints against some private players, and more comprehensive inquiry covering all road contracts will be undertaken.
The writer is a freelance journalist
The auditors can
file a non-conformity report if they
are dissatisfied
with the work
