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Major scam in Housing Dept unearthed
Large scale irregularities have surfaced in the Housing Department over the allotment of houses with the connivance of the officials of the department, contractors and middlemen. After conducting enquires at the field level, it was revealed that 32,244 beneficiaries turned out to be fake and crores of rupees were swindled.
Anantapur: Large scale irregularities have surfaced in the Housing Department over the allotment of houses with the connivance of the officials of the department, contractors and middlemen. After conducting enquires at the field level, it was revealed that 32,244 beneficiaries turned out to be fake and crores of rupees were swindled.
Among the 4,32,170 houses that were sanctioned, 3,98,374 houses were registered and the remaining were at different levels of construction and a whopping Rs 1171.69 crore was spent for the construction of these houses. However, the transactions did not take in a transparent manner and several irregularities came to light.
In some of the cases, old houses were painted again and fake bills were submitted, while in other cases, bills were submitted and money was swindled by showing non-existent houses. Though the officials of the Housing Department mulled filing of criminal cases and recover the amounts through the Revenue Recovery Act, nothing has been done and they remained silent after issuing notices.
Evan after several years, the Revenue Recovery Act was not implemented and it remained only on paper. The officials were allegedly hand in glove with the contractors in siphoning off the funds. Recently, the State government has come up with a geo-tagging policy to put an end to the irregularities in the housing department but the officials were reluctant to implement this policy.
Though the officials were asked to focus on this new policy, they remained indifferent. Speaking to The Hans India here on Saturday, the Project Director of the Housing Department Prasad said that though there was some delay in reimbursing the bills to the intended beneficiaries, it would be done as soon as possible. He said that steps would also be taken to recover the amounts from the bogus beneficiaries.
By:Payyavula Praveen
