‘Irregularities’ in picking firms for sanitation work, Yamuna Authority orders probe, FIR against officials

The CEO said that the decision to reduce the number of shortlisted companies even after the examination of the technical committee was arbitrary. Apart from GM (projects), the directions have been given to take action against the officials of work circle-6 including manager and senior manager.

YEIDA had issued two e-tenders of Rs. 9.59 crore and 8.15 crore on August 4 for cleaning and sweeping works in its 106 villages, which is divided into two zones- 60 villages in Zone-1 to Zone-5 and 46 in Zone-6 to Zone-9.

The documents shows that a total of eight companies had applied for sanitation works in Zone-1 to Zone-5 and seven companies had applied for Zone-6 to Zone-9. The technical committee, after the examination of the documents of the participating companies, had shortlisted a total of six and five companies, respectively, for bidding. However, when the file was sent to the GM (projects) for approval, he wrote ‘Re-examine’ on the file noting, without specifying any reason.

So acting on the GM’s direction, the technical committee re-examined the documents and this time short-listed three companies each for both the tenders. Interestingly, the same companies were shortlisted for both the tenders namely M/s Agarwal and Company, M/s Shree Ram Construction and M/s Manoj Kumar.

The CEO has now cancelled the decision of the re-examination of technical committee and restored the list of earlier shortlisted companies for bidding. Along with this, the CEO also directed that in place of GM, now a committee of ACEO and OSD will examine the report of the technical committee for all the new tenders in future.

“The price bid will be opened in due course and the two companies will be selected to handle the sanitation works in the villages of the authority area. The whole idea of the e-tendering is to make the process transparent and competitive, so that the good firms are selected for the work. To ensure this, I had also issued an order last year in July that if any of the documents of the participants are not available in the file for some reason, they may be informed about this to provide relevant documents,” said the CEO.

In its earlier investigation, the Yamuna Authority had found that around 30 percent of Safai Karmacharis of M/s Armament Security Services were missing and the the company was receiving salary in the name of fake employees. After this the company was blacklisted and the authority, in its 78th board meeting, decided that the sanitation work will be given to the two companies after the tender to create competitiveness and quality of work. It was also decided in the meeting that the number of Safai Karmcharis will be increased from 230 to 530.

So, this whole process of selecting a new company for sanitation works was initiated as per the board’s decision. The documents shows that the companies were removed from the shortlisted listed after the ‘re-examination’ for reasons such as ‘No stamp and sign of CA on audited balance sheet, the name of the department is written as GNIDA in the list of T&P (Tools & Plants) in the prescribed format, the attached Liquid Assets certificate letter is addressed to GNIDA’, among others.