BENGALURU: After dithering for two years, the Public Works Department (PWD) has accorded sanction for the prosecution of nine tainted senior engineers in the Ramanagaram PWD road scam.
But the name of one of the main accused, D Udayashankar, promoted as chief engineer four months ago, has been omitted from the list.
The PWD order, a copy of which is with Express, has this to say for omitting Udayashankar’s name from the list: “It is beyond the jurisdictional limits of the sanctioning authority in the PWD as it has no power to take a decision in cases of officers of the rank of chief eengineer and above. As Udayashankar has now been promoted to the rank of chief engineer, the Lokayukta request for prosecution against Udayashankar has been forwarded to the Department of Personnel and Administrative Reforms (DPAR), empowered to consider the request for sanction to prosecute officers of the rank of chief engineer and above.”
The explanation has raised many questions, including the one which is doing the rounds in the corridors of power: “Was the prosecution sanction delayed deliberately for two years and Udayashankar, then superintending engineer, promoted four months ago to the rank of chief engineer, with ulterior motives?” The case relates to the use of `600 crore special grants for 2011-12, meant to take up works on roads, bridges and culverts in the PWD’s Ramanagaram division.
High-ranking engineers and officials in the PWD allegedly used ingenious ways to favour two contractors by subverting the tendering process to ensure that no other contractors bid for the works.
The contracts were split into hundreds of smaller ones of less than `20 lakh each to gain an exemption from the Karnataka Transparency Act, which stipulates mandatory e-tendering for any works above `20 lakh.
The Lokayukta, who registered a suo motu case based on media reports on the alleged scam, in July 2013 wrote to the PWD seeking prosecution sanction against 10 engineers of the department, listed as main accused.
The accused are: assistant executive engineer A Nataraj, assistant engineer H S Venkatesh, assistant engineer Kantaraju, assistant engineer K R Anandkumar, assistant engineer K C Prabhakar, assistant engineer T V Mukundan, superintending engineer D Udayashankar, assistant executive engineer G S Siddalinga Kumar, assistant engineer V Krishna and assistant executive engineer S V Srinivas.