Corruption sweeps public money off roads
Officials get bills cleared for work that is not done
Road-sweeping machines are the latest money minting machines for private agencies and the GHMC officials. The contractors are hand-inglove with the civic body are getting cleared bills for work that has not been done.
Not only is this cheating the taxpayer, it is also leaving the roads dirtier than ever.
On August 21, 2015, the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) entered into an agreement with Marlin infra — Lion Services to maintain and operate sweeping machines. As per the agreement, the sweeping machines should work for 10 hours, from 9 pm to 7 am, daily.
Highly-placed sources in the GHMC say that the sweeping machines have been sweeping only one lane adjacent to the road divider but not all lanes. The machines are supposed to work for 10 hours but are working only for three hours and no social audit has been done.
Everything is on paper but none of it translates to any work on the ground.
Bills are being present- ed for work that has not been done and the bills have been passed by corrupt municipal officials.
“More than 60 per cent of the bills are fake. Due to the negligence of the GHMC, private agencies and ground-level staff have been swindling several crores of public money,” said the source.
When Deccan Chronicle conducted a ground verification, drivers of the sweeping machines said that the GHMC officials and contractor maintaining it has instructed them to sweep only four kilometres and a few lanes in 10 hours time.
They claimed that they were following the instructions of higher authorities. For instance, Nabi, a sweeping machine driver with registration number AP 29 BC 9125, sweeping from Alugadda Bavi towards Mettuguda on Saturday night, said that he is supposed to clean one lane on both sides of the road. “I am just following the instructions of Konda Reddy, who is my superior at work,” he said.
A senior GHMC official accepting that there are some irregularities in the sweeping machines operation said the civic body will make surprise inspections and take stringent action.
He said the civic body is spending `30.78 crore annually to clean 2,000 km arterial roads in the city. The question, as always, is why the corporation has to wait for the media to alert it to cheating and fraud going on in its own backyard.