Mid-Day: Mumbai: Tuesday,
April 01, 2014.
Government officials will stop at nothing to make
money, it seems. This newspaper has unearthed a multi-crore scam, in which
unscrupulous contractors and government officials connived to siphon off money
meant for welfare schemes for the poor.
This resulted in substandard social goods reaching
the poor and the needy of Maharashtra, and, in some cases, no goods reaching at
all. All of these welfare schemes are under the women and child, tribal and
social welfare departments.
At the centre of the scam worth over Rs 450 crore
is the Central Stores Purchase Organisation (CSPO), a state-run subsidised
kirana shop set up in 1992. The CSPO streamlines procurement of welfare goods
for social schemes by both the Centre and the State, which are run by the Zilla
Parishads (ZP) and local bodies.
Through manipulations and by bending rules,
officials awarded contracts for the purchase of goods worth Rs 451.88 crore to
second-rate contractors, who produced bogus documents obtained from fictitious
foundries at Ahmednagar and Rajkot, and fake test reports from Mumbai
laboratories to get contracts between 2010 and 2013.
Documents accessed by this paper under the Right
to Information (RTI) Act shows that Rs 271.88 crore of the total contracts were
fully routed through mysterious hawala operators, and payments for them
casually released by the government to traders, who did not deliver goods to
the needy on the ground. This money was later taken out of several bank
accounts of the fictitious operators and handed back to the traders.
cont.......
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