CHENNAI: Rattling officials of Public Works Department, the Tamil Nadu PWD Contractors (Engineering) Association erected a huge flex hoarding near the PWD office at Chepauk, warning that top 10 corrupt PWD engineers during 2014-15 would be named in such advertisements very soon.
Speaking to Express, association president S Gunamani took responsibility for putting up the flex board and said he would release a list of most corrupt engineers in the department within 10 days.
Gunamani’s demand was that these 10 engineers should be transferred out of Chennai so that the contractors could be saved.
What had forced him to go to such an extent? For ensuring contract, Gunamani claimed that a contractor had to pay 10 per cent of the project cost to top most persons and 35 per cent of the total cost to the hierarchy of engineers.
“Once upon a time, the commission stood at around six per cent. Now, the demand is going up every day. We are tired of giving commission and we can’t do this any more. That forced us to come to this decision,” he reasoned.
The flex hoarding that was noticed since Wednesday morning was reportedly removed by the city police later in the day.
Meanwhile, an audio recording of a purported conversation between an engineer and a contractor is doing the rounds on message sharing platforms like WhatsApp. The audio clip eventually reached the news television studios.
In the recording that runs for nearly six minutes, a person, apparently an engineer in the department, is heard vehemently demanding bribe from the person at the other end of the line, believed to be a contractor.
The ‘official’ begins the conversation by chiding the ‘contractor’ for not returning his call even after a day, and ventures to offer a lecture on work ethics - like returning calls and promptly paying up the commission as contractors are expected to.
The ‘official’ even pours his heart out to the contractor saying that if the contractor fails to pay up the required amount, he would have to commit suicide like Agriculture Department official Muthukumaraswamy had done.