Corruption eats into State development schemes

The corruption has seeped into practically all fields 8211; the Jawahar Employment Scheme, recovery of house building advance, using vehicles for non-official purpose and outside jurisdiction of the body, construction of toilets under the Rural Sanitation Programme, construction of open storm water drains, local supplementary nutritious food scheme, integrated childdevelopment and service scheme, receiving and depositing public funds with banks, training of women representatives newly elected to the panchayat committees, the school nutritious food scheme, the operation blackboard scheme, distribution of school uniforms, purchasing cement, medicines etc 8211; the list is endless.

Take for example corruption in construction of toilet scheme. The State Government provides Rs 2,500 to one person per family which is below poverty line to construct a toilet. The Panchayat Committee, Ambad in Jalna district, however, has flouted all rules in releasing grant under the scheme. In 1996, grant was released to more than one person in the same family for constructing toilet in as many as 51 cases. Surprisingly, none of them had produced the certificate of being below the poverty line. This cost the committee Rs 1,27,500 and the money needs to be recovered, says the report.

In another case, the Sangli zilla parishad collected fees from hundreds of primary students towards questionpaper expenses in 1996-97. Rs 76,601 thus collected were spent for purchasing furniture and other materials by the officials. Says the report, quot;It is not understood why the money was collected from the students when the primary education is free in the State. Moreover, who authorised the officials to spend this money for things like furniture?quot;

The Nagpur zilla parishad devised its own way to bungle with public money. It purchased 288 tons of cement 5,855 bags in February 1997 but 4,485 bags were lying unused till December 1997. quot;Inquiry revealed that the cement was purchased only to avoid the grant released by the Government. As a result Rs 5,06,805 were spent unnecessarily and the cement also was reduced to unusable state,quot; the report says.

Sadly, the report lists hundreds of such instances but fails to fix the responsibility for misappropriation of the funds. It also does not fix any deadline for the Government to initiate action against those guilty. Hence it is not known if such incidents will beprevented in future or the report will gather dust like thousands of other Government documents.