After five years, RTI activists get answers to queries on contracts
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The searches conducted by the Directorate of Vigilance and Anti-Corruption on the premises of former Minister S.P. Velumani and his associates have brought into focus the functioning of the Coimbatore Corporation between 2016 and 2021 — a period when there was no elected Council and the Corporation Commissioner was vested with its powers as a special officer.
The Corporation stopped posting online the resolutions passed by the Council from July 2017. The resolutions remained under wraps till July 2021. Activists and anti-corruption crusaders filed petitions under the RTI Act and moved the State Information Commission and even the Tamil Nadu Local Bodies Ombudsman. But the orders issued to the Corporation to make the resolutions public did not make a difference, as the civic body kept citing one excuse after another.
As RTI petitions kept piling up, the Coimbatore Corporation Contractors’ Association moved the court against disclosing the details of the works they had taken up for the Corporation. Citing an interim order, the Corporation officials kept denying information to RTI petitioners, sources said.
Only after the change of government in the State and the change of guard in the Corporation did the civic body start uploading the Council’s resolutions online, activist S.P. Thiyagarajan said.
The details he obtained a few days ago showed that 12 companies received ₹697 crore from the Corporation. Based on the Corporation’s replies to his RTI queries, Mr. Thiyagarajan said the civic body paid ₹32.71 crore to P. Senthil & Co., ₹140.32 crore to KCP Engineers (P) Ltd., ₹152.23 crore to Vardhan Infrastructure, ₹80 crore to Constronics Infra Ltd., ₹64.63 crore to Hosur Builders, ₹39.60 crore to S.P. Builders, ₹51.75 crore to Madras Infra, ₹43.69 crore to Vishnu Infrastructure, ₹38.73 crore to contractor J. Robert Raja, ₹20.25 crore to R. Rajan, ₹32.83 crore to E.K. Infrastructure and ₹15 lakh to Harsha Infrastructure (P) Ltd.
The payments, totalling ₹697 crore, which the Corporation made between 2016 and 2021, showed that many companies linked to the former Minister’s associates bagged a majority of the contracts, he alleged.
But these were tenders floated with funds under the Corporation’s capital expenditure account. In addition, there were works the Corporation had taken up under the then Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Mission, the Smart Cities Mission, the water and drainage fund and a few other accounting heads. Put together, the companies executed works worth around ₹2,000 crore for the Corporation, he claimed.
Sources said it was during this period that the Corporation’s finances weakened. From having over ₹200 crore in bank deposits, the civic body went bankrupt by the end of 2020. The period also saw the Corporation carry out several development works in wards that came under the Thondamuthur and Coimbatore South Assembly constituencies.
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