Producing three files which he said were evidence of how bogus bills were encashed, Dhas said in all, Rs 37.70 crore bogus bills were submitted and encashed (Facebook/Suresh Dhas)
BJP MLA Suresh Dhas, who has been making allegations against NCP minister Dhananjay Munde and his now arrested associate Walmik Karad, fired yet another salvo, alleging that bogus bills worth Rs 73 crore were submitted and encashed during the period when Munde was the Guardian Minister of Beed district. Dhas however refrained from directly naming Munde for submission of the bogus bills.
”The bogus bills were submitted under the district annual plan. They especially relate to road works. Who was Beed disrict’s Guardian Minister in 2021 and 2022 ? It was Dhananjay Munde. In Parli and Ambejogai areas, bogus bills were submitted, though not a single development work was carried out,” Dhas said while addressing a press conference in Beed on Wednesday. Dhananjay Munde is the MLA from Parli constituency.
Producing three files which he said were evidence of how bogus bills were encashed, Dhas said in all, Rs 37.70 crore bogus bills were submitted and encashed. All these bills were submitted to the public works department. ”The money changed hands from the district collectorate to Zilla Parishad and then Public Works Department. On June 25, 2022, Rs 37.70 crore was withdrawn without even implementing a single development work,” he alleged.
“We need to understand the modus operandi. The money is dumped from the collector to the Zilla Parishad. From ZP, the money is diverted to the Public Works Department. The money was not collected on March 31. This amount was collected on June 25, 2022. On one single day, Rs 37.70 crore was withdrawn…Not a single work was done, yet such a huge amount was encashed,” alleged the BJP MLA.
Dhas said the then district collectorate had cancelled the administrative approval for 57 works in Parli constituency. ”Despite this, bills worth Rs 14 crore were submitted. This is a serious offence.”
Dhas said from December 13 to March 31, 2023, Munde was the Beed district Guardian Minister during the MVA tenure. ”First, Rs 37.70 crore, then Rs 14.46 crore, Rs 16.20 crore and finally Rs 5 crore bogus bills were submitted. All this happened in a two-year period during the time Munde was the Guardian Minister and social justice minister. No constituency in Maharashtra must have seen these kind of bogus bills,” he said.
Citing a case, Dhas said Rs 5 crore were collected from the government without doing any work on the Parli-Badrapur road.
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Dhas said he will write a letter to Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis and Public Works Department. ”Besides, I will also inform Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar who will be visiting Beed tomorrow. Ajit Pawar should know how his ‘disciple’ is working.”
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.
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