PANJIM: Alleging large scale irregularities in the Smart City and Amrut Mission works in Panjim, the Congress on Monday met Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) Accountant General and demanded special audit of these works undertaken since 2017
In a memorandum submitted to the CAG Accountant General Anitha Balakrishna, the Congress alleged large scale irregularities in the implementation of Smart City and Amrut Mission works in Panjim through the Imagine Panaji Smart Coty Development Limited (IPSCDL) and demanded to conduct a special audit in the wake of four incidents of road caving and heavy trucks getting trapped in it due to extremely poor quality of work carried out without any planning.
The delegation stated that it is time to take it as a strong signal to arrest and stop the misdeeds in the IPSCDL as the seven years period of the Smart City Mission is about to get completed, it appears that the Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) created for the implementation of the missions is in a hurry to haphazardly carry out works that may have consequences leading to disasters particularly during monsoon.
Though the Missions were mandated to be citizen-centric with active participation of local stakeholders, not a single citizen is involved in any planning or execution. That there is no functional website of IPSCDL, should have been a cause for alarm looking into the sheer size of the financial outlay.
In the memorandum, the Congress alleged that all guidelines of the Smart City Mission are flouted and even a full-time chief executive officer of IPSCDL has not been appointed and suspected possibility of siphoning of huge public resources amounting to about Rs 1,000 crore.
The situation is causing inconvenience to every resident and visitor to the capital city and some of the businesses have had to suffer tremendous losses, it said.
The Congress also enclosed a set of 50 questions which were submitted to the IPSCDL chairman last week, for the perusal of the CAG.
Being a mission wherein the Government of India too has released financial grants to the IPSCDL, the Congress requested the CAG to report to the Union Ministry of Urban Affairs, all findings to prevent any further corruption from engulfing the Missions. The delegation comprised Elvis Gomes, Janardhan Bhandari, Varad Mardolkar, Johan Nazareth, Vyas Prabhu Chodnekar and Vikas Desai.
