8 PWD officials, contractor booked for ‘misappropriation’ of ₹11.5 crore

Eight officials of the public works department (PWD) have been booked for allegedly making excess payments to the tune of ₹11.5 crore to a contractor for the construction of the judicial complex in SBS Nagar. The contractor — Ms Tung Builders — has also been booked.

Eight officials of the public works department (PWD) have been booked for allegedly making excess payments to the tune of ₹11.5 crore to a contractor for the construction of the judicial complex in SBS Nagar. The contractor — Ms Tung Builders — has also been booked.

Eight officials of the public works department (PWD) have been booked for allegedly making excess payments to the tune of ₹11.5 crore to a contractor for the construction of the judicial complex in SBS Nagar. The contractor — Ms Tung Builders — has also been booked. (HT Photo)

Sections 409 (criminal breach of trust), 420 (fraud) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and Section 7 of the Prevention to Corruption Act have been slapped on three executive engineers Jasbir Singh Jassi, Rajinder Kumar and Balwinder Singh (now retired), sub-divisional engineer Ram Pal and three junior engineers Rajiv Kumar, Rakesh Kumar and Rajinder Singh besides accounts officer Rajesh Kumar. The IPC sections have been invoked as the ‘misappropriation’ took place before June 30. The Bharatiya Nyay Sanhita (BNS) was effected from July 1.

The FIR was registered on the recommendations of the department in the Nawanshahr Sadar police station on August 1. These officers were already chargesheeted. The action came after it was highlighted in these columns on August 31 last year that PWD’s internal probe had indicted the accused.

The probe, titled ‘misutilisation of funds regarding judicial court complex, SBS Nagar’, was ordered by the department on July 7 last year after a committee of the Punjab and Haryana high court took up the delay in the construction work with the PWD, the nodal agency for constructing the judicial courts complex. Besides the delay, many discrepancies, like excess payments to the contractor and flaws in the construction, were also found.

According to the probe conducted by the PWD headquarters, the contractor got undue favours in the form of price escalation, performance security, excess payment, payment of variation and release of bank guarantee even as the work was not complete. A fresh tender worth ₹11 crore has been invited by the PWD to complete the project.

Glaring shortcomings

The judicial complex was to come up on 13.2 acres at the cost of nearly ₹55 crore. In total, 11 courtrooms, 156 lawyer chambers, houses for judicial officers and basic infrastructural amenities were to be built.

The probe found that neither the work to fix door frames was executed nor the material was available at the site. Same was the case with window frames, float glass panes and supply of steel for multi-level parking, Kota stone and coloured granite stones. This amounted to a loss of ₹3.42 crore, the probe committee found.

The contractor was given an escalated payment of ₹2.67 crore, whereas as per the estimate of the technical adviser to the chief minister, the provision for the escalation was kept at ₹1.85 crore, the report added.

The ₹1-crore bank guarantee of the builder, deposited for the tender, was also released. An officer has submitted to the probe team that signatures of the superintendent shown to the bank for the release of the guarantee amount are forged. The security amount of ₹2 crore was also released by the department to the contractor without even penalising him, the report further added.