Chennai corporation’s age-old system of evaluating trip sheets of garbage loads brought to its dumping yard came under scanner and the corporation suspended four of its employees including an engineer on Saturday.
The staffers were booked for forging the trip sheet data of tipper lorries, which results in loss to the state exchequer. The modus operandi is additional trips will be entered in to the logbook resulting in more payment to the contractors engaged in the clearing of garbage in Chennai.
Regimes come and go, but this malpractice has been going unchecked for the past ten years, admit confidential sources raising the question, whether a huge scam is yet to be cracked by the Ripon Building authorities.
A press release from the Ripon Buildings said an enquiry conducted with regard to the final disposal of garbage in the Perungudi dumping yard revealed fabrication of truck deliveries that was offloading garbage. It was found that staff involved in documentation of 68 trucks over the past two days forged records.
Subsequently assistant executive engineer K. Varadharajan, and conservancy inspectors M. Dinakaran, K. Ramadoss, K. Sundaram were suspended to give way for a detailed enquiry. A new team has been put in place to take care of the dumping yard, the release said.
A senior corporation official said that though the departmental enquiries and suspensions are ordered, the private contractors who bribe the solid waste management staff often scot-free.
The issue has been persisting ever since the corporation outsourced waste management to private firms twelve years back.
Former corporation commissioner Rajesh Lakhoni in fact tried his best to curtail the menace and introduced Global Positional System (GPS) in the vehicles to monitor trips online but the move failed to serve its purpose as corporation staff often failed to repair the faulty GPS systems, the official said.
According to corporation sources the private contractor engaged in removal of solid waste is currently paid Rs 1,469 per tonne of garbage and close to 1,000 tonnes of garbage are removed per day by the private firm. The total garbage generated in city per day is estimated to be around 4,500 tonnes.