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The World Bank-linked road project behind Keralam's vigilance inquiry into CEC Gyanesh Kumar
The allegations date to Kumar's years as PWD secretary, when a World Bank-funded road upgrade ran into delays, cost overruns and a contractor's death.
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The Vigilance and Anti-Corruption Bureau (VACB) inquiry that Keralam home minister Ramesh Chennithala ordered on October 4 against Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar is linked to the World Bank-funded Kerala State Transport Project (KSTP), a road-upgrade programme from Kumar’s years as secretary of the state’s Public Works Department (PWD).
Kumar, a 1988-batch IAS officer of the Keralam cadre, headed the PWD when it awarded and oversaw work on the project. The allegations first surfaced in 2006 and led to a preliminary VACB inquiry that year, which the new inquiry will continue.
Chennithala said he ordered it after taking legal advice and consulting chief minister VD Satheesan.
The complaint comes from a Congress leader, and Keralam's Congress-led government ordered the inquiry while the Congress and other Opposition parties are pressing for Kumar’s removal as CEC over the controversial electoral roll revision exercise.
The Opposition has built its case against Kumar around the special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, a house-to-house re-verification of voter lists that critics say has wrongly disenfranchised millions across states. On September 24, Rahul Gandhi demanded Kumar's immediate resignation, citing formal objections raised by the two other election commissioners, Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, to decisions of the commission. Opposition parties and groups, including the pressure group Cockroach Janta Party, have also staged protests demanding his resignation.
The Election Commission has said all its decisions over the past year, including those on SIR, were unanimous decisions of the full commission.
The project
The KSTP was proposed in 2002 to improve the state’s highways and major district roads. According to the World Bank, its objectives were to improve traffic flow and road safety on the state’s primary roads and to strengthen the institutional and financial capacity of the main transport agencies.
The Bank noted in a report that although Keralam had a dense and extensive road network for its size, the poor quality of the roads was holding back development. Road safety was another concern, with high annual vehicle registrations and a 27% rise in traffic deaths between 2005 and 2011.
The plan was to widen and strengthen 581km of road, 254km in the first phase and the remaining 327km in the second. The project was to cost $336 million ( ₹1,612 crore), of which the World Bank would finance $255 million ( ₹1,224 crore) and Keralam $79 million ( ₹388 crore).
The first-phase roads included Kottarakkara–Chengannur (44km), Alappuzha–Changanassery (24km) and Muvattupuzha–Angamaly (31km), which the project treated as parts of the original Main Central (MC) Road, the 240km arterial highway linking Thiruvananthapuram and Ernakulam districts.
What went wrong
The project ran into trouble early.
In December 2006, the Bank downgraded implementation progress to "moderately unsatisfactory" after consistently poor performance across its components, and the Keralam government and the Bank agreed a seven-point action plan to bring it back on track.
In May 2008, the state government dropped the second-phase works from the project altogether.
A World Bank report in 2009 recorded a “substantial increase in the likely cost of completion for the civil works of phase 1 corridor due to time and cost overruns”. That left only $30 million of the loan for phase 2 works, far short of what they would have cost, the report said. The Bank attributed the phase 1 overruns “largely on account of severe delays in land acquisition and utility relocation”.
The 2006 allegations
Allegations of criminal misconduct surfaced in 2006, after Lee See Been, a 58-year-old Malaysian civil engineer who was chief project officer of PATI-BEL and held a key supervisory role on the project, died by suicide in Kuala Lumpur on November 11 that year.
Kerala home and vigilance minister Ramesh Chennithala said Been had written two notes and named Kumar in one of them.
PATI-BEL – an Indo-Malaysian consortium formed by the Malaysian firm PATI and its Indian partner, Bhageeratha Engineering Limited (BEL) – was at the time working on the project to upgrade the MC Road, for which the World Bank lent ₹215 crore.
In the latest complaint, Congress leader Malayankeezhu Venugopal, a member of the party's state executive, alleged that repeated delays on the project had led PATI-BEL to complain to the state government of the time.
“Been had come to the state several times to meet top PWD officials urging them to clear his bills on time. He was under tremendous pressure from the sub-contractors. The treatment meted out to him by then PWD officials was extremely bad,” Venugopal alleged.
After Been’s death, Kumar was moved out of the PWD secretary's post in 2006.
The LDF government of VS Achuthanandan, then in office, ordered several vigilance inquiries into the KSTP project, including the preliminary VACB inquiry into Kumar’s role. Kumar went on central deputation to Delhi that year. “He never came back to the state and the probe fizzled out,” Chennithala said.
“Though the vigilance inquiries were initiated, I understand that they were kept in abeyance for reasons unknown,” Venugopal said. None of the probes reached the prosecution stage.
Venugopal’s latest complaint accuses Kumar of departing from established procedures in awarding contracts and of clearing bills for favoured parties.
“As the top official in the PWD, Kumar was the final word on administrative, technical and financial sanction for the construction works. It was alleged that the code of procedures was violated under his leadership,” Venugopal told HT on Monday.
What the parties say
TM Thomas Isaac, the CPI(M) leader who was finance minister in the 2006-11 LDF government, welcomed the new inquiry and said the country needed to know what happened in 2006. “The case files of the 2006 vigilance probe should be with the department. They must be examined. As far as I know, PATI-BEL did not want to continue with the project at the time and was fearful of the company's name being maligned by a corruption probe. But today, the circumstances are different and people can come forward with any evidence they have,” he said.
Chennithala called Venugopal's complaint “serious” and said the government could not ignore such allegations against Kumar once they had been brought to its notice.
“I cannot become a mute spectator after receiving such a complaint. I have forwarded it to the vigilance director to go into the details of the complaint and take legal action. The petitioner also claims the earlier inquiry in 2006 was compromised due to external influence. That is serious too and needs to be examined,” he said.
The BJP has asked that the inquiry also examine lapses by both the LDF and UDF governments during Kumar’s years in the state.
“This is a 20-year-old case. At the time, both the LDF and the UDF ruled the state, one after the other. Both governments are seen to have given clearances to Kumar. Why did they not register a case against him? In contrast, despite ED submitting evidence against [former chief minister] Pinarayi Vijayan in the CMRL [Cochin Minerals and Rutile Limited] case, the UDF only orders a preliminary inquiry instead of handing it over to the Vigilance wing. This shows two types of justice,” said BB Gopakumar, BJP MLA from Chathannoor in Keralam.
The CEC has not publicly responded to the accusations.
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