Smelling a rat in a rodent killing contract awarded by the Maharashtra Government, former Minister and senior BJP leader Eknath Khadse on Thursday alleged that the contractor concerned had accomplished the task of killing a staggering 3,19,400 rats at the State Secretariat in mere seven days as against the six months’ period originally stipulated for the purpose in the contract.
Raising a point of information during a discussion of budgetary demands in the State Assembly, Khadse put his own party’s Government in general and Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis in particular in the dock, by saying that there was more than met the eye in the manner in which the rat killing contract was executed. The contract had been awarded to a private firm by the General Administration Department (GAD) headed by Fadnavis himself.
Khadse said after a physical survey conducted by GAD revealed that there were 3,37,000 lakh rats — of different kind — at State Secretariat, the State Government had awarded a contract to a private firm to eliminate the rats.
“Initially, the contractor was given six months’ time to execute the contract. However, the period was reduced to three months later. Mind you, the super-efficient contractor concerned killed 3,19,400 rats in a week. But, I would definitely like to know that how could the contractor and his men could eliminate that many rats in mere seven daysIJ, Khadse asked.
"If one were to go by the statistics, the firm in effect killed 45,628.57 rats a day. The decimal figure of 0.57 must be the new-born ones. This means 1901.19 rats were killed in an hour. It also means the company killed 31.68 rats every minute,” Khadse said, as members across the party lines burst into peals of laughter.
"To put it in nutshell, the firm concerned killed one truck of rats every day. The weight of the killed rats is 9,125 kilograms. Will the government show us the place where the carcasses of the rats killed were dumpedIJ" the BJP leader asked.
Khadse said that the firm that been given two rodent killing contract executed the work between May 3, 2016 and May 10, 2016. later, the former minister said tongue-in-cheek: "The state government could have deployed ten cats to do the job instead of hiring a private firm". Seeking to draw parallels between the rat killing exercise undertaken by the state government and the one executed by the Shiv Sena-controlled BMC, Khadse said: “The BMC took as much two years to kill six lakh rats in different parts of Mumbai”.
Khadse had resigned from his post as the State Revenue Minister over irregularities in the purchase of a plot of land at Bhosari in Pune. Ever since a State Government-appointed judicial committee, headed by retired Bombay HC judge Dinkar Zoting, that went into allegations of corruption against Khadse gave a clean chit to him.
Considered number two, Khadse used to hold 10 portfolios — including Revenue, Relief and Rehabilitation, Earthquake Rehabilitation, Minorities Development and Wakf, Agriculture and Horticulture, Animal Husbandry, Dairy Development and Fisheries and State Excise — in the Devendra Fadnavis Cabinet.