COIMBATORE: Assembly Speaker and Radhapuram MLA M Appavu (DMK) in Tirunelveli district and Kinathukkadavu MLA S Damodaran (AIADMK) in Coimbatore have allegedly procured smart boards and other items for government schools through DRDA from a vendor paying twice the amount he had quoted on his portal.
According to sources, while Appavu procured 306 smart boards spending Rs 7.11 crore (at Rs 2.3 lakh a board), Damodaran inaugurated smart boards at 32 schools in his constituency spending Rs 64 lakh from the MLA's fund. Sources said the Chennai-based company, which installed and supplied the boards, mentioned the price of a board as Rs 1.24 lakh on its portal.
When contacted, Appavu told TNIE, "In the AIADMK regime, total cost for setting up a smart classroom was three lakh and after DMK came to power, it was reduced to two lakh. The same company has provided web cameras and UPS to schools and I am unaware of the price. They were procured under the supervision of former Tirunelveli collector Vishnu."
Damodaran told TNIE that he is also unaware of the price of the boards. "Based on school headmasters' requests, I sent a request to DRDA which carried out the entire process, including tender for procuring the boards. I have spoken to representatives of the company which supplied the boards not only to Kinathukkadavu but also entire Tamil Nadu."
PMK's Coimbatore district secretary Ashok Srinithi, who visited one of the schools in Kinathukkadavu, said, "The Chennai-based company mentioned the price of a board as Rs 1.24 on its portal. It appears that almost twice that amount has been spent. We posed as buyers and got a quotation from the same company which agreed to offer a smart board at just Rs 1.05 lakh.
This shows there is a huge scam in the procurement. When I put out a video about this, the owner of the company called me and said he would be incurring extra expenditure on installation work and the final price of the board would work out to a little of Rs 2 lakh a piece. How can installation cost come so high? This clearly shows MLAs in the ruling DMK and the opposition AIADMK have indulged in a huge scam."