‘Don’t desilt tanks via open tenders’

PUDUCHERRY: A water users' forum in the Union territory urged chief minister V Narayanasamy not to award the work to desilt tanks through open tenders and insisted to rope in eri sangams (tank users' associations) for the work.
Bangaru Neeradhara Koottamaippu (BVNK) president V Chandrasekhar in a memorandum to the chief minister charged that the lowest bidders, who bag the desilting contract, fabricate records and claim payments without desilting tanks with the help of a few corrupt officials in the local administration and public works departments and some corrupt politicians.
“All these 40 years, the public works department continued investing money through open and low quotation tendering processes and desilted these tanks only on paper. In the meantime, majority of the 84 tanks also got encroached upon heavily. This is what the open and low quote tendering process resulted in as this process is known for high level corruption with very little work getting done,” Chandrasekhar said.
He said the territorial officials sanction escalated bills to the contractors that were sometimes even double the amount quoted by contractors in the tendering process. “A scrutiny of past open tender works, their original quotes and actual payments to the contractors would make this factor quite clear,” he said.
The forum said Puducherry had 87 irrigation tanks and close to thousand ponds when the French rule ended and the territory merged with the Indian Union. The French had an efficient tank management system wherein the maintenance of water bodies was done with the participation of local farmers.
“In the 40 years that followed when the management of the irrigation tanks was entrusted to the local administration and public works departments, three tanks were completely encroached and urbanised beyond retrieval. Currently, we have only 84 tanks and more than half of the ponds have also been encroached and converted into private lands and real estate plots and sold off. Currently, we don’t have even 500 ponds left. This shows their inefficiency,”he said.
He said the Tank Rehabilitation Project-Puducherry (TRPP) launched in 1998 with funding from the European Union (EU) re-identified the 84 tanks and cleared the encroachments in coordination with the eri sangams. “The tanks were desilt and restored to its original water holding capacity and, in most cases, doubled its water holding capacities. The EU funded TRPP was a huge success and government decided to extend the TRPP project for another five years with its funding, and the project was extended up to 2008,” he said.
He argued that when eri sangams could identify the neglected irrigation tanks and retrieve them from encroachments and desilt them and bring them back to their original water holding capacities with little financial resources why should the government prefer to opt for the open tendering process.