The Times of India 10.08.2010
MCD revises contract midway
NEW DELHI: After the central vigilance commission unearthed a scam in phase-I of MCD’s streetlighting project, phase-II also appears to be dubious. The civic agency has revised the earlier budget contract for the second phase, increasing the budget amount by Rs 12 crore. MCD claims the budget got inflated as it decided to undertake more stretches in phase-II after the award of the contract.
An MCD official said, “According to the terms and conditions of the contract, no fresh tenders could have been floated for road length measuring less than 100km. We could not have included these stretches in phase-III as more streetscaping stretches had been taken up and streetlights had to be installed along these. Therefore, we decided to revise the existing contract and ask the same company to carry out work on the 26 additional stretches also.”
MCD officials claimed that a separate tender for `just 40km of road length’ would not have made sense considering the paucity of time. An official said, “If a fresh tender was invited there would have been a possibility of receiving higher rates and the process of awarding work would have consumed more time.”
Interestingly, the revised contract was placed for approval before the MCD House meeting only on Monday even as the second phase work is expected to be completed by August 31. Said an official: “We had taken in-anticipation approval beforehand as work had to start immediately.”
The initial contract dated June 2009 budgeted at Rs 60 crore for covering 157km of road stretches now stands revised at Rs 72 crore with 26 new road stretches being included.
These 26 additional roads where streetlights will be installed lead to the Games venues, training venues, hospitals, historical locations, hotels and tourist areas. Some of these roads include Hauz Khas Village main road, Savitri cinema road, Shaheed Surya Sen Marg, B C Pal Marg, Lotus Temple Marg, Veer Savarkar Marg and Shiv Mandir Marg.
MCD’s proposal document for the revision of the existing contract states that as per directions given by the Delhi government, the work of streetscaping and streetlights was required to be completed latest by mid-July as these are related to the Games.
While the civic agency claims its second phase of upgrade of streetlights is almost complete, there is no word on phase III of the project. As part of the last phase, MCD was to install new, upgraded streetlights along 704km of road. But the civic agency claims it has not received Rs 200 crore for the project from Delhi government so far.
The CVC report had mentioned that MCD officials were allegedly involved in tampering with a bid document relating to upgrade of streetlights under phase-I.
