The Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike’s decision to withdraw the pourakarmika audit continues to draw flak from citizens who are alleging that preliminary audits had uncovered multiple and outdated entries on the pourakarmika rolls.
Members of the Nav Bharat Democratic Party met the Mayor on Wednesday and requested that the third-party audit be continued to uncover the full extent of “duplication”.
The audit of one ward, Mahalakshmi Layout, had revealed 50 “bogus entries”.
“Each of these bogus employees are paid a salary close to ₹15,000 from the BBMP, which multiplied into 50 comes to ₹7.5 lakh. This is in just one ward, assuming that a similar number of bogus entries exists in each ward, it would come to ₹14.8 crore a month across all 198 wards, or an annual sum of ₹180 crore,” said Anil Shetty, founder of Nav Bharat Democratic Party.
He said that if the public were not allowed to participate in the audit, the party would not accept the results and would stage a protest against it.
When the list of pourakarmikas was uploaded on the BBMP website a month ago, many citizens had pointed out irregularities — in some cases, many employees had the same address or the same names appeared multiple times on the list. BBMP Joint Commissioner, Solid Waste Management, Sarfaraz Khan said BBMP officials who had been designated as part of the Solid Waste Management cell would conduct a thorough audit of pourakarmika rolls and upload it in the public domain. BBMP officials on condition of anonymity alleged that it was pressure from councillors that led to citizens being kept out of the auditing process.
