PWD minister Shiv Pal Yadav, who had set an October 15 deadline for repairing of roads, on Wednesday repeated that officials found guilty of failing to ensure smooth roads would be suspended.   The executive engineer, superintending engineer and chief engineer of the region would be immediately placed under suspension if any pot-holed road is detected, he said while noting that some roads were in a bad shape in Etawah and his repeated warnings have not been taken seriously by engineers.

Yadav, who made headlines for his if-you-work-hard-you-can-steal-a-little remark, said that it has come to his knowledge that officials were taking commission in the department in the name of higher-ups. “An FIR would immediately be lodged if such a complaint is received against any official now,” he said. While progress of road repair and construction work was unsatisfactory in Kannauj, Muzaffarnagar, chitrakoot, Varanasi, Balia, no work had been undertaken in districts like Mathura, Ambedkarnagar, Sultanpur, Gorakhpur, Deoria, Kushinagar, Banda, Kannauj and Pradbuddhnagar.

“This is because officials keep sitting on files related to the work and their seniors never take notice of the fact,” Yadav said. He has directed principal secretary PWD to fix responsibility of the concerned officials if any file remains pending for more than two days in his department or gets stuck for over seven days with the finance department.

Because at this rate, we will not be able to utilize R7500 crore budget that has been allocated for repair and construction of new roads in the state for 2012-13, he pointed out.