CHENNAI: The Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) has flagged discrepancies in preparing estimates and awarding contracts for civic work such as road construction, through collusion of contractors and engineers, resulting in a loss of 1.41 crore to the Greater Chennai Corporation.
In a report, the CAG said after scrutinizing 21 packages tendered for laying interior roads between 2015-2017, it estimated the civic body lost 1.41 crore.
The modus operandi was quite simple.
For construction of an interior road, the civic engineer would prepare estimates for at least 13 items of work such as laying of bituminous concrete, excavation of earth, reducing or lowering the height of the manhole, providing polysulphide sealant in the expansion joints of concrete, supply of PVC pipes for draining of water.
However, only one or two items of work would be carried out.
And the contractors quoted low rates for these items of work.
On record, all the work was completed within the agreed cost.
But scrutiny revealed that in five packages, 13 items were not carried out.
In another six packages, some of them were completed only partially (3-46%).
These contractors won the bid only because they quoted low rates.
For instance, in Royapuram, for a package where 41 interior roads had to be laid, two contractors took part.
As both bid 20% in excess of the estimate, the corporation invited the lowest bidder for negotiations.
The bidder reduced the cost of a component, ‘raising or lowering the manhole cover’, to 250 per item.
His original bid was 1,500 per item, which itself was lower than the estimated rate of 2,495.45 per item.
By this abnormal reduction, the total bid value was brought down by 8.3% and the work was awarded to the contractor.
The CAG audit found the contractor did not carry out even a single ‘lowering or raising the manhole cover’.
In another package that was estimated at 9.92 crore, the contractor had quoted 11.97 crore.
He was called for negotiations and he reduced the rates for 10 of the total 14 components bringing the total value down to 10.66 crore.
But the completion reports revealed that in 62 of the total 86 completed roads, the contractor had just executed two items, which was laying a readymix concrete and a non tendered item which was dummy joints over cement concrete surface.
Seven components quoted were not executed.
The report said in almost all the sampled packages a similar pattern was found and the commissioner had stated that some of the work couldn’t be carried out due to site restrictions.
The CAG pointed out that this meant that estimates were prepared without considering site conditions.
The auditor said only fixing responsibility for these lapses will prevent their recurrence.