Officials milk Gujarat housing board dry

SURAT, July 16: Their ingenuity and intelligence was meant to be an asset for the Gujarat Housing Board (GHB). Sadly enough, things didn't ...

SURAT, July 16: Their ingenuity and intelligence was meant to be an asset for the Gujarat Housing Board (GHB). Sadly enough, things didn’t work out quite the way the GHB had thought they would. And now, having lost crores of rupees, the board is keeping a wary eye on its senior officers.

A massive racket has come to light recently, in which unscrupulous state housing board officials, in collusion with private contractors, created an artificial demand for houses by depositing money in the name of fictitious buyers. Once the contract was awarded and the payments made, the refundable deposits would be withdrawn, leaving the board to fend for itself.

The racket called for a well-planned, intelligent modus operandi. Newspaper advertisements placed by the senior officials would invite a flood of applications from their favourite contractors. This would entail a paltry investment of around Rs 100,000 for 200 applications, as each called for a deposit of Rs 500 which would eventually return to the contractors.

Once the demand was established, the “favoured” contractor, with a little help from senior board officials, would secure the contract for constructing houses equivalent to the number of applications. Then the applications would be withdrawn, along with the deposits. Then the GHB would be left holding several hundred unwanted houses.

The contractor also made a killing through sub-standard construction. Well aware that it would be a long time before the houses were allotted, there would be nobody to complain of bad workmanship. Both the officials and the contractors made crores, while the GHB’s huge investments went down the drain.

Obscure sites and dilapidated structures only served to further the cause of the senior officials and unscrupulous contractors: to milk the GHB dry. So bad was the situation, that the GHB had to slash house prices by 10 per cent to attract buyers.

But going by the policy – better late than never, the Board has revised the norms to plug the loopholes that made such a racket possible. Now the applicants have to pay a deposit of 10 per cent of the house cost, which after three months becomes non-refundable. It is only after the expiry of the three-month period that the contract is awarded, thus eliminating chances of fictitious applications.

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Board chairman, Praful Barot, who suspended six officers for sub-standard construction in the Chhapra Bhata scheme, admitted that the norms for new schemes were revised after the racket was unearthed. He admitted involvement of board officials in the earlier schemes, but expressed inability to punish the guilty as there was no proof of their involvement.

Claiming that the racket would be virtually impossible to pull off in the present scenario as all the loopholes had been plugged, Barot said the Board was still picking up the pieces, trying to find owners for vacant houses worth Rs 45 crore, though buildings worth Rs 25 are yet to find buyers.

Apart from plugging loopholes, the Board, whose recovery bills for instalments and penalties from non-existent tenants amount to nearly Rs 132 crores, it is also determined to make the going tough’ for its officers.