Road scam: After auditors, now site engineers arrested

The Azad Maidan police on Saturday arrested four site engineers of private contractor firms in connection with the BMCrsquos road scam taking the total number of the arrested accused in the case to 14 However the police have not arrested the contractors as yet The entire road scam since past three years is said to be over Rs 350 croreThose arrested have been identified as Sanjay Dinanath Singh 37 of Ms J Kumar KR Construction JV Sunil Bapusaheb Chavan 28 of Ms Relcon RK Madhani JV Sandip Ashok Jadhav of Ms RPS KR Constructions JV and Santhanavel Velmani 23 of Ms RK Madhani amp CoThe four site engineersrsquo job was to check if the work was being carried out properly They would issue requests for inspection to the audit firms after completion of the work as per normsldquoThe requests for inspection were made by the accused on the instructions of contractors and cleared by the audit firms The arrested accused from the audit firms then falsely informed the BMC that the work done was fine despite shoddy work and they may clear their billsrdquo said an officerContractors to be heldAround Rs 1056 crore of the state exchequer has allegedly been lost due to this crimeHowever police have not arrested any contractors yet When asked about this police PRO DCP Ashok Dudhe only said ldquoTill date we have arrested contractor firmsrsquo four site engineers and the investigation is onrdquoHowever a senior officer supervising the investigation said ldquoThose arrested are not just the site engineers they are representatives of the contractor firms so there is no question of going soft on the firms We are going systematically and interrogating the accused whose instructions they followed Once we get concrete evidence against the contractors they will not be sparedrdquoThe four arrested have been remanded in police custody till June 21 by a holiday court Earlier police have arrested 10 auditors of the two third party audit firms for allegedly wrongly verifying the work done on the roadsThe caseIn April this year the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation BMC had registered a first information report against six contractors and two auditorsrsquo firms in connection with the road construction scam The FIR was registered under Sections 120 A criminal conspiracy 197 producing false documents and 420 cheating of the IPC by chief engineer roads Manohar PawarDuring the inspection of 14 roads from the island city 11 in western suburbs and nine in the eastern suburbs the BMCappointed inquiry team found massive irregularities in road repair and reconstruction work as the foundation of the roads was not according to the standard and the quality of road work was shoddy states the FIRThe FIR states the shoddy job by contractors cost the civic body more than Rs 10 crore of public money Similar irregularities by contractors were found in the inquiry for the period of 2013 14 201415 and 201516 taking the entire scam to the tune of over R350 croreThe scamAccording to an inquiry report submitted by Additional Municipal Commissioner Sanjay Deshmukh all 34 roads sampled in the first phase of the inquiry were found to have violations The committee had dug trial pits and taken samples of the material The committee found that in most cases entire layers of the roads were missing It was only after these violations were found that the BMC filed an FIR against the six contractors involvedTwo chief engineers had been placed under suspension pending a departmental enquiry The civic body is also probing the role of the other engineers working on these projects following which action will be taken against them