A borewell in Vidyaranyapura ward has notched up a whopping bill of Rs. 49,254. The catch here is that the borewell has been defunct for a year now.
These allegations were made by the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), which conducted a social audit recently. Ravi Krishna Reddy of the AAP alleged that there were pending bills amounting to Rs. 1.05 crore for sinking borewells (in three different instalments of Rs. 47 lakh, Rs. 40 lakh and Rs. 20 lakh) in the ward.
“We inspected four borewells, of which only one was used, and that too for just a few months after the power connection was given,” he said.
He accused the Bruhat Bangalore Manahanagar Palike (BBMP) of sinking borewells “unnecessarily” to utilise the funds worth Rs. 50 lakh given to each ward to provide drinking water to citizens, which is why many are now defunct. “This is just wastage of public funds. Now, who is going to pay the bill of Rs. 49,254?” he said.
While BBMP Commissioner G. Kumar Naik said he was unaware of the issue, officials of the Bangalore Electricity Supply Company (Bescom), who visited the spot, said they were checking if the borewells belonging to the BBMP in the area had the same RR number. This is to check if the bill pertained to a single one or all of them.
