States are showing an unexplained indifference to upload names of blacklisted/debarred contractors on the Centre’s website as has been mandated under the Pradhan Mantri Gramin Rural Sadak Yojana (PMGSY) to ensure transparency and weed out corrupt contractors from the rural job scheme. While the Centre has taken a serious note of it, it has also directed public enterprise National Project Construction Company (NPCC) to do the same after reports of anomalies in the scheme being executed by it were reported from Bihar, West Bengal and Jharkhand.
“The guidelines of PMGSY, itself makes it mandatory for the States to provide details of the contractors who have been black-listed/debarred from executing PMGSY works on the Centre’s website. However, the States are not following the norms,” said a senior official from the Union Rural Development Ministry.
He said that posting the names of the blacklisted contractors helps the other States to keep such companies at a bay. Otherwise, at times, such contractors manage to make their way in other States and get the road construction job.
PMGSY is a one-time special intervention of the Centre to provide rural connectivity, by way of a single all-weather road, to the eligible unconnected habitations in the core network.
As per PMGSY guidelines, procurement (tendering & award of works) and execution of PMGSY works is responsibility of the State Government.
The official said that the issue of posting the names of the blacklisted contractors and companies has been discussed in detail in various meetings like pre-empowered committee, empowered committee and regional review meetings etc.
“Inspite of this it has been observed that no State has uploaded the details of blacklisted/debarred contractors on the Ministry’s website. With a view to strengthen the PMGSY with quality implementation by the States, this information becomes necessary,” the official added.
He also referred to several anomalies ranging from poor quality to delay in the road construction work being executed by NPCC, under the Pradhan Mantri Gramin Sadak Yojana (PMGSY), in Bihar, West Bengal and Jharkhand.
The Ministry took serious note that while NPCC was sitting over projects for as long as six to nine years in many cases, works were awarded to a single contractor in some blocks. Moreover, the NPCC even ignored their irregularities in the works. Unhappy at the shoddy job, the Ministry instructed the agency to blacklist defaulting contractors and initiate legal action against them, said a senior official from the Ministry
Till a few years ago, the States were uploading the names of the defaulters on the Ministry’s website themselves. In 2013, the scheme has seen as many as 150 contractors, who were unable to execute projects, getting debarred from the tendering process and have been blacklisted. Some of them were fly-by-night contractors, while some did not have technical expertise to execute this huge programme.
Jharkhand topped the chart with 72 blacklisted contractors, followed by Madhya Pradesh with 61 and Karnataka with 11.