CAG slams HRD Ministry over Aakash project

The Aakash project aims to provide $35 tablets to students for educational purposes.

Slamming the Human Resource Development (HRD) Ministry for its management of the Aakash tablet project,a CAG report tabled in Parliament on Friday questioned the ministrys decision to award the project to the new and ill-equipped IIT Rajasthan (IITR). The CAG report also pulled up IITR for incurring unfruitful expenditure in the project.

The Aakash project aims to provide $35 tablets to students for educational purposes.

Saying that the ministry failed to exercise due diligence in implementing the project,the report said the arbitrary selection of IITR was the reason why the delivery schedule of tablets was adversely affected.

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The report also slammed the ministry for not carrying out a feasibility study before undertaking the project. It stated that while established IITs like IIT Kanpur,Bombay,Madras,Kharagpur had participated in preliminary discussions on the project,they were overlooked and instead IITR,which was relatively a new IIT,was selected. It also said official records do not provide any justification for selecting IITR.

While the HRD ministry,which was then led by Kapil Sibal,had originally awarded the project to IITR,it was eventually transferred to IIT Bombay after differences arose between IITR and the tablet manufacturers,Datawind.

The report also pulled up IITR for unfruitful expenditure of more than Rs 1 crore and pointed out that PCs and tablets worth Rs 20.67 lakh procured by the institute were not transferred to IIT Bombay. IITR has also been pulled up by the auditor for appointing a retired MHRD officer as advisor for three months for Rs 0.50 lakh and allowing him to work for only 15 days in a month when such clauses were not mentioned in the advertisement for the job.

The report added that Rs 47.72 crore was released by the ministry to IITR in an imprudent and hasty manner between October 2010 and March 2011.