Rajya Sabha member and UP incharge of Aam Aadmi Party, Sanjay Singh, said the companies working on drinking water projects had failed to perform.
He said this had surfaced in the review meeting of Jal Jeevan Mission. “The Jal Jeevan Mission scam, the lid of which was opened by AAP is even bigger than National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) scam,” he alleged and reiterated his demand for a CBI probe into the Jal Jeevan Mission.
He claimed the engineers had sent missives to their senior officials stating the tenders were given at a rate many times higher than the existing rates in the department.
“The department even sidelined the EFC’s approved rates and tenders’ rates were decided at whims and fancy,” he said.
Giving details of the review meeting of Jal Jeewan Mission, Singh said the scam was more than Rs 1,000 crore. “All the 21 companies assigned the work failed to perform and the Jal Jeevan Mission suffered a heavy setback,” he said.
Training his guns at the BJP, Singh said the allegations which he had leveled in the past had proved true in view of details of the review meeting of Jal Jeevan Mission.
“The Jal Jeevan Mission itself has validated the allegation of the AAP about anomalies in the allotment of tenders in Jal Jeevan Mission project. The engineers had written how the tenders were allotted at a rate 30-40 per cent higher than the approved rates. The letters written by the engineers also exposed how financial power was increased from Rs 1 crore to Rs 5 crore,” he claimed.
The AAP leader said the executive director of the mission had sought the new list of approved rates by writing to the Managing Director of Jal Nigam. “The letter to Jal Nigam MD was written under the pressure of engineers who had pointed out the flaws,” he said.
He hit out at Water Resource Minister Mahendra Singh saying the minister had explained that a third party inspection was being done to ensure the quality of work in the Jal Jeevan Mission.
“But there was a scam even in the third party inspection. Other states are getting the TPI work done at 0.5 per cent but in Uttar Pradesh it is being done at 1.33 per cent,” he pointed out.