Rs 1,000-cr Jal Shakti Mission works being allotted without tenders

Tribune News Service

Srinagar/Jammu, September 7

The allotment of works of more than Rs 1,000 crore in the Jal Shakti Department to accomplish the target of providing water to each and every household in Jammu and Kashmir is underway without inviting mandatory tenders, sources said.

Jammu and Kashmir has been allotted Rs 1,800 crore for the mission. The project aims to provide piped water supply to 1.76 lakh households in J&K. Earlier, the deadline was set for December 2022, but now it has been advanced to March 2022. J&K has 18.17 lakh households, of which nearly six lakh are already having the piped water supply.

“The works under the Jal Shakti Mission are being allowed on the nomination basis by doing away with the normal practice of open bidding through tenders,” said a source privy to behind the scene developments.

The department, it is learnt, has put the proposal to allocate the work of such a huge amount and that too concerning the public health, to the National Bridge Construction Corporation and National Project Construction Corporation on the pick-and-choose basis without determining the merit, especially when the past record of the NBCC and NPCC in J&K is considered dismal.

The sources said a panel, headed by Chief Secretary BVR Subramaniam, had opted to take this route on the claim that these were the public sector decisions, without assigning reason for bypassing the standard procedure. The dissent against bypassing the standard rules in the allotment of such projects was steamrolled.

As the word has leaked out that the nomination process is being adopted, the things are going slow now, but not scrapped.

The work was in progress, a source said.

The sources said the matter was of utmost importance because of the public health in which the quality of the material and work matter the most.

The analogy that the J&K Government used to allot the works to the Housing Department, Police Housing Corporation, and Small Industries Corporation (SICOP) and other PSUs in the similar manner didn’t fit here as that was meant to make these corporations viable, the sources said.

“It is a huge amount and concerns the public health where the quality and transparency could not have been given a go by,” the sources pointed out.

The nomination process has raised many an eyebrows, particularly when it is known that the NBCC could not complete the deep drain/sewerage project in Jammu and the National Projects Corporation’s work in the Bakshi stadium in Srinagar was more or less in the same category.