Tehelka; Radhika Sachdev; Tuesday , December 21 , 2010,
2,500 RTIs; a dozen-odd director general (DG) level officers who leave in disgust even before the start of the Commonwealth Games; vendors fighting for a clearance of their over dues -- there is plenty of evidence to book Kalmadi and Lalli
Two men, driven by a common purpose -- to make the maximum of an Rs 1,669 crore opportunity, that leads to an Rs 8,000 crore fraud.
This is the estimated loss assessed by the Central Vigilance Commission (CVC) during the Commonwealth Games (CWG) 2010, in reply to a right to information (RTI) application filed by news agency Press Trust of India. The actual figure could be much higher in the report that is finally tabled sometime next year.
Meanwhile, the CVC has admitted to finding pieces of evidence pointing to lapses, cost overruns and financial irregularities not just against the CWG Organising Committee (OC) but also against various Delhi government agencies, namely, the Public Works Department (PWD), the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, the Central Public Works Department (CPWD), the Delhi Development Authority (DDA), the New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC), along with RITES Ltd, the engineering consultancy wing of the Indian Railways, the Department of Commerce and the Indian Meteorological Department. Yet in all this brouhaha, only two persons’ names surface, that of Suresh Kalmadi, chairman of the OC, and of Baljit Singh Lalli, CEO, Prasar Bharti, the host broadcaster of the Games.
Kalmadi and Lalli were not just public faces of the CWG, the duo also became hugely unpopular within their respective organizations for their autocratic, ad-hoc style of functioning and charges of corrupt practices such as delayed payments to vendors, payments to non-existent entities, wilful delay in the execution of contracts, inflated pricing and financial bungling in the purchase of equipment, among some of the malpractices highlighted in the CVC report.
Today, if the case against Kalmadi is so strong, it is because one of his own aides, TS Darbari, who is currently in the custody of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and has agreed to turn approver, while another aide, Sanjay Mahendroo, also in police custody, is likely to follow suit.
Indeed, gradually there are more disgruntled officers and former aides coming out of the shadows to vent their spleen against Lalli and Kalmadi, as a consequence of which Lalli is already on his way out, while Kalmadi’s fall appears imminent.
One such officer who is now willing to go on record is Uday Sahay, an former officer of the Indian Police Service, who joined as director general (publicity) in the OC, wanted to quit in June 2010 but was retained as advisor to the chairman and later made in charge of the RTI cell in the OC. Sahay said there must be close to 2,500 RTI applications in the files that the CBI sleuths can access. Other sources of information could be officers who left the OC mid way, or vendors whose payments were withheld or who felt manipulated by the OC. In fact, cronyism and complete disregard for laid-down procedure marked every OC deal.
About his role as director, publicity, Sahay said, “The two brands, the Games brand and Kalmadi’s personal brand, were so incompatible we once had to ask Kalmadi to hire a separate PR agency for himself, but surrounded by sycophants, he brushed aside our suggestion.”
The result, said Sahay, was disastrous. “Every time Shera, the Games mascot, was caught on camera, there was Kalmadi’s face peering out from the frame and no one was amused.”
“Non-empanelment of advertising agencies further complicated the situation. JWT was hired for a fixed term along with two smaller agencies, Mercantile and Quantum. Their contract expired but they had to continue because their payments were withheld. Withholding payments of vendors became a norm in the OC,” he recalls.
Devesh Shah, partner, Mercantile Advertising, the agency that won the contract for Rs 88 lakh for releasing (not making) a one-minute short film during the Queen’s Baton Relay (QBR) in December 2009, said, “We don’t know who the creative agency was. The film was okay-okay. We managed to release it on a few TV channels.” Shah said his company was able to recover Rs 83 lakh from the OC after a year’s delay, just before the Games’ closing ceremony.
Shah alleged that the other agency, Quantum Communications, was hired for designing and launching the QBR in London for Rs 3 crore without any tendering process because its chief executive, Sanjay Rastogi happened to know Darbari, the joint director general in the OC, very well. Rastogi, when contacted, declined to comment on the matter.
Earlier, a retired army officer, Colonel P Padmakaran, who was the first director-level appointment in the OC (he joined in 2005) and took voluntary retirement two months prior to the Games, said that between January 2009 and September 2010, at least 20 people of the rank of additional director general (ADG) and above quit the OC, got sacked, or simply stopped coming to office (see box).
“A director drew a monthly remuneration of Rs 50,000 to Rs 70,000, although there was considerable variance even there,” he said.
In addition, about 40 people of assistant project officers (APO) level and above also quit between May and August 2010. “The exodus was mainly from the technology and the administrative side,” said Padmakaran.
Sujit Panigrahi, ADG (technology), who joined in September 2008 and quit in January 2010, said, “As a professional, I was completely disillusioned with their way of functioning. There were things that should not have happened; deals that I warned them about, but after it fell on deaf ears, I had to leave.”
According to Sahay, the big scams were hatched in the technology department, overseen by OC secretary Lalit Bhanot. Next in order comes the bungling in the purchase of overlays (temporary infrastructure) at a whopping cost of Rs 600 crore to Rs 700 crore, followed by the cost incurred in the opening and closing ceremonies and in the purchase of time, scoring and result (TSR) equipment from a Bern-based company by the name of Swiss Timing, part of the Swatch Group. The case against a British event management company, ES Group, which was hired for the overlay work, first appeared in The Guardian in August 2010.
Sangeeta Welinkar, who was hired as ADG (image and look), found it difficult to brush these issues under the carpet, so she along with her son Udhav Waman Welinkar, hired as administrative assistant (volunteer programme) quit a month prior to the Games.
Meanwhile, Vijay Kumar Gautam, a 1987 batch Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer and former chief operating officer (COO) in the OC, who at one time was perceived as close to Kalmadi, quit after complaints of financial bungling came up against him. Gautam is being investigated for finalising deals worth Rs 200 crore. When contacted, Gautam said he’s travelling and would be willing to talk upon his return to Delhi next week.
On November 9, in a written reply to a question raised in the Lok Sabha, MS Gill, the minister for youth affairs and sports, disclosed that of the Rs 1,669 crore that were disbursed as a loan to the OC for the conduct of the Games, it was able to recover only Rs 326 from the sale of international TV rights, Rs 114.15 crore from sponsorships and Rs 39.17 crore from ticket sales.
Kalmadi responded characteristically. A day before flying to Beijing for the Asian Games, he asked his publicity team to issue full-page advertisements in all leading newspapers that set more tongues wagging the next morning.
Meanwhile, even as Kalmadi was running the OC as his personal fiefdom, Lalli was digging a fashioned his modus operandi along the lines of the OC chairman’s.
A 1971 batch IAS officer of the Uttar Pradesh cadre, Lalli, like Kalmadi, showed complete disregard for the norms of public probity and accountability. He took controversial decisions, not bothering to keep the Prasar Bharati board -- a 12-member statutory body chaired by former editor of Hindustan Mrinal Pande – informed, putting him on a frequent collision course with Pande. On several occasions, Pande complained to the Information and Broadcasting Minister Ambika Soni about Lalli’s conduct.
President Pratibha Patil has now given her assent to Lalli’s dismissal. A month ago, the Delhi High Court had stripped him of all his executive powers and appointed a three-member committee, including Prasar Bharati member, finance and personnel, to oversee Prasar Bharati’s day-to-day functioning. The basis for the court order was again a CVC report that found Lalli culpable on five out of eight charges of misdemeanour. He promptly went to the Supreme Court, decrying the “intrigue and mischief” against him, but later withdrew his appeal from the apex court.
One case against Lalli that continues to draw maximum media flak is the one concerning SIS Live. A partnership between UK-based Satellite Information Services Ltd and its overseas arm SIS Outside Broadcasts Ltd, SIS Live was contracted to provide live telecast of the Games in high definition for a fixed amount of Rs 246 crore. The schedule of payment negotiated with SIS Live was in the ratio of 30:70 (30 per cent in advance and the balance on delivery). Later, due to continuing delay in securing possession of the Games venues, Lalli changed this payment schedule to 60:40.
Phil Aspen, commercial director of SIS Live, who is now in India, said, “This 40 per cent is now overdue.”
Although AK Jain, member (finance), Prasar Bharati, said the board was not informed about this change in terms, a stand maintained in public by Leena Nandan, a Uttar Pradesh cadre IAS officer appointed project director for the host broadcaster’s team in Doordarshan, documents in possession of Tehelka show that Aruna Sharma, director general, Doordarshan, a close aide of Lalli’s, was aware and had communicated the change in writing to SIS Live. Nandan was unavailable for comment despite repeated attempts.
As for sub-contracting the bulk (about 70 per cent) of the work to smaller contractors that forms the second part of the complaint in the SIS Live case, Aspen said that this is a standard practice followed in all countries. Interestingly, Clause 14 of Prasar Bharati’s contract with SIS Live, a copy of which is with Tehelka, reads: “Entity shall not assign or transfer the contract or any part thereof but HB (host broadcaster) acknowledges that the Entity will utilise sub-contractors/production associates for the performance of the Services.”
As any legal hand can tell, this is very clever wording of a contentious clause, one that can be interpreted either way by both parties. In this case, it was SIS Live that happened to exploit the ambiguity in the clause.
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