After the suspension of 12 executive engineers in a silt scam, the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) will soon bring all engineering works under various smart city initiatives to prevent irregularities.
In two months, the city’s civic body will monitor the works real time by making it mandatory for the officials and the contractors to take photos of the sites and upload them along with time stamps. The supervising officers will also be asked to geo-tag the work area as well as the vehicles used in the transportation of the materials or silt.
Supervisory system
“We want to do away with the archaic system of maintaining records and the way payments are done,” said a senior official of the corporation.
“Apart from introducing several reforms related to e-office, we want to strengthen the supervisory system. The inspections by senior officers has come down over the years.
Regular site visits
We will instruct the senior engineers to regularly visit the site where the work is being carried out.
A workshop will be held in the coming few days to stress on the importance of inspections.”
After preventing a loss of ₹1.8 crore by detecting fraud bills submitted by 27 contractors in desilting works taken up last year, the GHMC is also looking in to other desilting works to check if similar offences were committed by other contractors also.
An inquiry officer will soon be appointed to look in to the scam and decide on the departmental action against the suspended engineers.
Arrests criticised
A section of engineering officials in the GHMC criticized the police department for arresting the officials allegedly involved in the scam.
“We are not against the suspension but oppose police officials booking criminal cases against the engineers. They should have referred the case to the GHMC Commissioner.
Only after an departmental inquiry report is out, can some serious action can be taken.
We will submit representations to the Minister concerned and the GHMC Commissioner after which we will decide our future course of action,” said K. Kishan, general secretary of the public health engineers association.
