Newsletters

Edition

International .(Open in new tab)

Journalism of Courage

Premium

This is an archive article published on December 1, 2022

Documents related to deals worth around Rs 5,000 crore ‘missing’ from PCMC

Among the departments that have come under the audit department’s scanner are those related to building permissions, health, town planning, gardens, sky sign and public relations.

The audit report will be placed before the standing committee and submitted to municipal commissioner Shekhar Singh, department officials said. (File)

Documents related to transactions worth Rs 4,917 crore have “gone missing” from various departments of the Pimpri-Chinchwad Municipal Corporation (PCMC) in the past 40 years, the audit department has found out.

The audit report will be placed before the standing committee and submitted to municipal commissioner Shekhar Singh, department officials said.

“During the 2014-2015 audit, it came to our notice that documents related to deals of Rs 4,917 crore have not been made available to the audit department by various other departments,” corporation chief auditor Pramod Bhosale told The Indian Express on Wednesday.

Story continues below this ad

Also Read | After Bombay HC rap, Pune RTO says will consider ‘afresh’ Rapido’s application to operate in city

Bhosale said he would not like to call them missing documents. “We would like to instead say that these documents were not made available to the audit department since 1982, when the PCMC came into being. The auditors who conducted the audit 30-40 years back had mentioned that certain documents related to deals worth some amount had not been made available. Similarly, subsequent auditors also made such remarks when the past documents were not made available to them during audits. The pendency of documents not made available has come to be worth over Rs 4,900 crore,” Bhosale said.

The audit officials said the documents were not made available to them despite repeated reminders to the departments concerned. “Every time an audit was conducted by the audit department, it has sought relevant documents from the civic departments. However, they have failed to provide the documents,” an official said.

Also Read | Six-month road safety drive on Pune-Mumbai highways begins; overspeeding, lane cutting, wrong parking to invite action

Besides, the audit report has also raised objections “to an expenditure of Rs 1,296 crore by various departments”. The report has also said that Rs 119 crore is recoverable. “Recoverable means the civic department concerned will have to recover them from the parties or contractors. This amount cannot be written off,” an audit official said.

As many 44,118 objections were made during the annual audit.

Activist Maruti Bhapkar, on whose intervention over a decade ago the Bombay High Court had censured the corporation for failing to conduct audits, said the “missing” documents raised serious questions. “It could mean that the PCMC had paid the amount for non-existent transactions or deals. This is a very serious audit objection. It means that over the years, many wrong things have happened in the PCMC’s corridors. At least now, the PCMC administration should wake up and take appropriate action,” he said.

Story continues below this ad

Among the departments that have come under the audit department’s scanner are those related to building permissions, health, town planning, gardens, sky sign and public relations.

Manoj Dattatrye More

Manoj More has been working with the Indian Express since 1992. For the first 16 years, he worked on the desk, edited stories, made pages, wrote special stories and handled The Indian Express edition. In 31 years of his career, he has regularly written stories on a range of topics, primarily on civic issues like state of roads, choked drains, garbage problems, inadequate transport facilities and the like. He has also written aggressively on local gondaism. He has primarily written civic stories from Pimpri-Chinchwad, Khadki, Maval and some parts of Pune. He has also covered stories from Kolhapur, Satara, Solapur, Sangli, Ahmednagar and Latur. He has had maximum impact stories from Pimpri-Chinchwad industrial city which he has covered extensively for the last three decades. Manoj More has written over 20,000 stories. 10,000 of which are byline stories. Most of the stories pertain to civic issues and political ones. The biggest achievement of his career is getting a nearly two kilometre road done on Pune-Mumbai highway in Khadki in 2006. He wrote stories on the state of roads since 1997. In 10 years, nearly 200 two-wheeler riders had died in accidents due to the pathetic state of the road. The local cantonment board could not get the road redone as it lacked funds. The then PMC commissioner Pravin Pardeshi took the initiative, went out of his way and made the Khadki road by spending Rs 23 crore from JNNURM Funds. In the next 10 years after the road was made by the PMC, less than 10 citizens had died, effectively saving more than 100 lives. Manoj More's campaign against tree cutting on Pune-Mumbai highway in 1999 and Pune-Nashik highway in 2004 saved 2000 trees. During Covid, over 50 doctors were asked to pay Rs 30 lakh each for getting a job with PCMC. The PCMC administration alerted Manoj More who did a story on the subject, asking then corporators how much money they demanded....The story worked as doctors got the job without paying a single paisa. Manoj More has also covered the "Latur drought" situation in 2015 when a "Latur water train" created quite a buzz in Maharashtra. He also covered the Malin tragedy where over 150 villagers had died. Manoj More is on Facebook with 4.9k followers (Manoj More), on twitter manojmore91982 ... Read More

Click here to join Express Pune WhatsApp channel and get a curated list of our stories

Photos

In pics: From concept supercars to electronic SUV's: Bharat Mobility Global Expo 2025 was all about innovation

In Pics: From Concept Supercars to Electric SUVs – Innovation at Bharat Mobility Global Expo 2025