E-Paper
City builders stumble on a money plant
CONCRETE JUNGLES no longer tempt city builders who seem to have been lured away by greener pastures?literally!? thanks to LDA?s propensity to spend crores of rupees in the name of plantation.
CONCRETE JUNGLES no longer tempt city builders who seem to have been lured away by greener pastures—literally!— thanks to LDA’s propensity to spend crores of rupees in the name of plantation.
Take for example the case of the relatively lesser-known Sharda Nagar colony of the LDA on the Kanpur Road. According to sources, the development agency has spent Rs 3.20 crore on planting saplings and putting up tree-guards around them in the colony! A guesstimate of the kind of mega-bucks involved in the business can be made from the fact that the LDA had set for itself a target of planting around 1.08 lakh saplings in various schemes all over the city. Of this, 15,000 saplings were to be sowed in the Sharda Nagar scheme alone. The tab that the job fetched the LDA: Rs 3.20 crore. Rs 60 lakh was reportedly spent in planting saplings in just one section of the colony – Ratan Khand. Multiply this with 1.08 lakh plants and the figure becomes mind-boggling.
No wonder it did not take long for the builders give up their occupation and make a frantic bid to grab the lucrative plantation contract. The lead was taken by Akash Builders, who planted 16,730 saplings in Jankipuram Extension Housing Scheme of the LDA on Sitapur Road. Jyoti Construction Company, on the other hand, just had to content itself with a contract to for 500 plants that it reportedly sowed from the Sahara Shaher gate till Ambedkar Park in Gomti Nagar. A nondescript NGO by the name of Lok Kalyan Sewa Sansthan, however, bagged the lion’s share in the plantation drive with a contract to sow as many as 23, 193 saplings in Gomti Nagar, Aishbagh, Ram Nagar, Tikait Rai ka Talaab colonies of the LDA.
According to sources, Rs 1.25 crore was spent on planting some 15,000 saplings in Jankipuram. A dichotomy of sorts when you consider the same number of plants cost Rs 3.20 crore to the LDA in Sharda Nagar. Right? Wrong, say the LDA officials.
“The reason being that we had provided a list containing names of more than two dozen different varieties of plants, along with the approved prices at which they could be bought,” said a senior LDA official. The prices ranged from a quibble Rs 35 to Rs 5,000 per sapling. It was left to the engineers to choose the variety they wanted. Hence, the difference, he pointed out.
The real picture, according to LDA officials, would emerge only after a random on-the-spot verification was made in various LDA colonies. Sure enough, LDA VC BB Singh has ordered a probe on the number of saplings planted by the development agency in the past three-years. It remains to be seen whether the findings of the inquiry report, if and when it is completed, would be made public or not.
