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Uproar in Mohali MC House over delay in vigilance probe into advt tender allotment
As Mohali MC secretary Surjit Singh began to read the agenda for the House approval, the councillors interrupted the proceedings, insisting to take up the resolution related to fresh advertisement tenders and sought an action-taken report pertaining to the same
Furore prevailed in the Mohali municipal corporation (MC) House meeting on Thursday as councillors questioned the delay in a vigilance probe into the civic body’s failure to allot the advertisement tender five times, causing revenue losses.
During the meeting that was held after a gap of around six months, the councillors accused the MC officials of corruption and deliberately not initiating a vigilance probe into the matter.
As MC secretary Surjit Singh began to read the agenda for the House approval, the councillors interrupted the proceedings, insisting to take up the resolution related to fresh advertisement tenders and sought an action-taken report pertaining to the same.
MC House had approved vigilance inquiry in March
During the budget meeting held on March 1, the MC House amid pandemonium had approved the agenda to seek a vigilance inquiry into the civic body’s “failure” to allot the advertisement tender four times.
The nod had came after councillors demanded to know how the civic body failed to achieve its proposed income of ₹31 crore in 2023-24 through advertisement tender, earning just ₹6.11 crore, despite advertisement hoardings being allotted across the city.
Two weeks after the MC House passed the said resolution in the March meeting, the civic body had invited fresh tenders.
In its fifth attempt, MC divided the city into four zones with separate smaller tenders, with hopes of finding contractors in the 2024-25 fiscal, but again to no avail.
An agenda for framing a fresh proposal to allot an advertisement tender was again tabled in the House on Thursday.
Now, MC has divided the 320 advertising sites in the city into various categories and six separate tenders will be floated.
The tender amount has also been reduced from ₹31 crore to around ₹28.5 crore.
While 198 sites, including unipoles, gantry and billboards, will be divided into four zones, which will be available for ₹26 crore, another category has been created for 33 bus queue shelters and a sixth category for 89 toilet blocks across the city.
Initially, there were 339 sites, but 19 have been removed by MC due to ongoing road widening by GMADA in Phases 8 to 11.
Annoyed with MC’s continuous failure, councillors, including former deputy mayor Manjit Singh Sethi and Sukhdev Singh Patwari, asked mayor Amarjit Singh Sudhu to fix accountability of the officers and pass a fresh resolution of getting the vigilance probe conducted in the issue.
Patwari demanded revision in rates set for the advertisement sites in the fresh tenders.
After councillors also blamed the mayor, senior deputy mayor and deputy mayor, besides MC commissioner for failure of the tender, deputy mayor Kuljit Singh Bedi said he had written a letter to the local bodies director on June 18, seeking a probe for failure and for fixing responsibility of the officers concerned.
After much ruckus on the issue in the House, the mayor agreed for a vigilance probe and added it in the advertisement tender resolution. However, a senior MC officer said unlike Patiala MC or other MCs, the sites or the tender amount was not reduced here and every possible effort was being made to allot the tender.
