NELLORE: The district administration has unearthed a `240-cr scam in the implementation of the Indiramma Housing Scheme (IHS) in the Nellore district, according to informed sources.
Disclosing this to Express here on Thursday, they added that the scam involved the pocketing of a part of this amount by the officials allotting thousands of IHS houses to ineligible persons and taking a cut in the amounts fraudulently paid to contractors for work not done or for substandard works.
They said that the district administration had unearthed the scam while probing into certain irregularities in the implementation of the IHS at the behest of the State Government. They said that following the submission of a report on the scam by the district, the state government would soon depute a team to probe the scam.
It may be recalled here that Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu, who had inspected the ongoing IHS works at YS Rajasekhar Reddy Nagar here during his electioneering in the 2014 elections, had promised that justice to the original beneficiaries of the project and punishment to those who had usurped the houses as well as the officials who had colluded with them. Accordingly, the TDP government had asked the district administration to probe the irregularities in the implementation of the programme and submit a report to it.
The district administration had conducted a thorough probe into the issue by adopting the Geo-Tagging System (GTS), which was linked to the applicants’ Aadhaar cards, to know whether the houses had been allotted to the original beneficiaries or not. In the process, it was found that 64,487 of the 2,42,868 IHS houses had been allotted to ineligible persons and that all but one such ineligible persons had become untraceable.
In an earlier report submitted to the government, the district administration had said that irregularities had been noticed with regard to the allotment of 4,000 houses and that the recovery process was under progress.
But after the intervention of the Chief Minister in the issue and ordering the district administration to thoroughly probe the irregularities, the latter re-conducted the enquiry with the help of the GTS and found the fraudulent allotment of the houses and fraudulent payment of money to contractors by the officials, which enabled them to pocket `240 cr in the process.
During the probe, it was found that most of the ineligible persons had usurped the IHS houses and that, in some cases, five members of a same family had been allotted separate houses by the officials under political pressure.
Meanwhile, there are also allegations that the officials had paid money to some contractors who had not constructed a single IHS house of if they had done so they had used substandard materials for the same.