Former PM Morarji Desai is said to have described the notoriously corrupt Public Works Department or the PWD as Plunder Without Detection.
As far as the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation is concerned, no one has come close to Desai, even though the BMC has been labelled by none other than the Bombay High Court as the most corrupt organisation.
Wags have named it the Bombay Mining Company but that’s like non-alcoholic beer. More about that later.
The same BMC did a sterling job of controlling Covid in Dharavi but the reason for harping on the money guzzling mahapalika is that corruption seems to be finally becoming an issue in the forthcoming civic polls. Not because of a PIL or a journalistic expose or even a white paper by the Aam Aadmi Party.
The charges of big-time corruption in the richest civic body in India are being levelled by Shiv Sena’s former ally, the BJP. The Shiv Sena, which has ruled BMC for the last two decades, has played the victim card. It may even work in the polls.
However, the charges are serious and the details are damaging. If the Income Tax Department is to be believed, Standing Committee Chairman Yashwant Jadhav and four contractors supposedly linked to him have 36 `benami’ properties worth Rs. 130 crore.
It also leaked to the media that a diary entry by Jadhav lists Rs. 2 cr against `Matoshree’, which Jadhav says refers not to the residence of his party chief but his mother. Given that the BMC’s budget for 2022-‘23 is 46,000 cr,this is a small change.
Anyway, diary entries have never amounted to much in court. What is known though is that the apex civic committee was famously described as the 'understanding committee’ by former CM Vilasrao Deshmukh.The Sena seems to be on the backfoot here.
Even small-time BJP leader Mohit Kamboj, whom the BMC was targeting, threatened to expose I S Chahal, the same officer who won accolades from WHO for his work in Dharavi. The CAG has questioned the BMC over a sharp increase in the BMC in the construction cost of the Mumbai Coastal Road Project from Rs. 252 crore in 2011 to Rs 1,274 crore in 2018--a 405 per cent rise. As of now, the estimated cost is 12,700 cr.
In the current civic budget, Rs 3,200 has been set aside for the 10-km-long stretch of the Coastal Road between the Princess Street Flyover and Worli. Just the cost of an international tourist centre in the 4.5 acre Worli Dairy plot is Rs 1,000 cr when the international cruise terminal at Indira docks is coming up at half the cost.
Even builders say that realty prices can be brought down by as much Rs. 2,000 per sq ft if corruption is eliminated from the Buildings Proposal Department of the BMC.
Recently, four staffers in the BMC’s Licence department were given executive postings even though they are facing bribery charges. Several black sheep were recalled in the name of staff shortage during Covid. The ideal plastic road project was reduced to a 100- metre patch in a remote corner of Bandra West and given a quiet burial. A company that was blacklisted in Pune was within a fortnight given works worth Rs. 100 crore for five Covid centres in Mumbai.
The three companies hired for medical oxygen supply were blacklisted and two of them failed to deliver but were not penalised. While the average cost across in India for a sewage treatment plant was Rs. 1.7 crore per million litre, BMC floated the tender with a cost Rs. 7.47 crore per million litre.
The Supreme Court is now monitoring the process. It is unfair to single out the BMC though. Urban local bodies across the country are notoriously inefficient even in corruption.
For the common man, the municipality is the ulti-pality but wages have done no justice to it. Recently, an audit into the South Delhi Municipal Corporation revealed “irregularities of over Rs. 1,600 crore”. This is when Delhi’s municipalities have failed to pay teachers and sanitation workers' salaries on time. We simply seem to have accepted widespread corruption in our civic bodies.
What can the poor citizen do if he can’t get the body of a relative killed in an accident without bribing the morgue clerk? Here are some more news items buried in the inside pages: The Bombay HC ordered CIDCO, MMRDA, the Vasai-Virar Municipal Corporation to file affidavits by February 21 about allegations in a PIL that the development plan for the area was in limbo for 13 years, during which 883 reserved plots were encroached upon and funds misused.
The Mithi River Project in Mumbai, which includes dredging, constructing a security wall and service road, is incomplete even after 17 years, during which Rs. 1,150 cr has been spent on it. In Paithan, an RTI query revealed that civic works for Rs. 80,000 were billed at Rs. 8 lakhs by the surreptitious addition of a zero.
Urban planners say that civic bodies in India suffer from either understaffing, which leads to a failure in delivering basic urban services, or overstaffing of untrained manpower, shortage of qualified technical staff, and managerial supervisors.
Lack of supervision has resulted in an unwillingness to innovate methods for service delivery. It is time to ask some tough questions about the quality of governance in urban local bodies. Are the taxes we pay being put to good use? Are infrastructure projects chosen based on what’s best for the public or best for the ruling party?
What is the benchmark for civic services? What is the accountability of civic officials? And lastly, are our municipal corporations working on a plan?
In this context, it is heartening to see Mohalla committee members in Pune urge citizens to join them on a one-day inspection tour of their localities before they cast their votes in the upcoming civic polls. Finally, here are two weak attempts at matching Morarji Desai: Best Method of Corruption and Bombay’s Mindboggling Corruption.
(The writer is an independent journalist based in Mumbai and writes on civil society, law enforcement, environment, and urban development. He tweets @anilsingh703)
