JAJPUR: Days after three engineers were booked by Kaliapani police for alleged involvement in a road construction scam in Nagada, the investigation officer (IO) has now written to the Superintending Engineer (SE) of the circle seeking crucial documents which he claims are not available.
The IIC of Kaliapani police station Sushant Kumar Dash, IO in the case, began investigation and served notices to the three engineers to report in the police station for recording their statements last week. He also visited the office of the executive engineer of Jajpur division-1 multiple times to get hold of documents relating to the scam and found that many secret tender files are yet to be seized.
Documents like divisional cash book, bill forms filled by the contractors for payments, tender notice, approval letter from the higher authorities relating to the tender, original estimate of the tender, newspapers in which tender notice was published, license, name, address and bank details of contractors besides sanction letter of the work from District Mineral Foundation (DMF) office and other details relating to the secret tender files are crucial for the investigation but were unavailable.
“I failed to collect all those documents from the office of the executive engineer of Jajpur division-1 despite many visits. Since these are essential for the inquiry, I finally wrote to the SE for assistance,” he said.
In 2016-17, tender for construction of a 7.6 km long motorable road from Ashokjhar foothills to Nagada village was floated at a cost of Rs 12.96 crore from the DMF and awarded to Andhra Pradesh-based Haigreeva Infratech project limited. As per the agreement, it was mandatory on part of the contractor to execute all maintenance work of the project for two years after its completion, failing which its security money was to be forfeited.
When condition of the road became bad a couple of months post completion, Haigreeva Infratech did not carry out any maintenance work. However, the executive engineer of Jajpur division-1 allegedly released the security deposit of over `65 lakh to the contractor.
The RD department sanctioned Rs 43.65 lakh for its repair and reconstruction in December 2020 and approved the tender. But instead of floating a single tender, the executive engineer distributed the work through a number of tenders of `5 lakh each by K-2 format without approval. The K-2 contractors carried out substandard repair work of the road but the executive engineer cleared their payments.