Goemkarponn desk
MARGAO: With the Monsoon session of the Goa legislative assembly scheduled in July, Shadow Council for Margao today called upon Margao MLA Digamber Kamat to demand a white paper from the government with regard to the development works undertaken in his Constituency.
Several development works are undertaken by different executing agencies like the PWD Div VI, XIII, XIV, the WRD, GSUDA, GSIDC, PWD Water Supply, Sewerage Department etc., SCM Convener Savio Coutinho said.
“Hundreds of crores worth of works are executed by all these agencies, towards which huge amounts get paid to the contractors from the public exchequer”, Coutinho stated.
However, only some significant changes can be seen in the Constituency that match up to the Bills paid, he added. There is ample evidence to prove that the works executed are shoddy and substandard, he says further.
A glaring example is the construction of a Branch nallah behind ESI Hospital by the WRD department. Here a proposal for improvement of Hydraulics of an existing nallah was moved by the Margao MLA, SCM pointed. “And to improve the “HYDRAULICS”, it was essential for the WRD to reconstruct an existing Box culvert which happens to be half of the size of the existing nallah. The expenditure towards the reconstruction of the Box Culvert would have been hardly 5 to 6 lakhs,” opined Savio Couinho, a Civil Engineer himself. Surprisingly, and very suspiciously, the WRD chose to construct a “parallel nallah” with an estimated cost of 81 lakhs instead of the reconstruction of the Box culvert. This is a criminal wastage of public funds, Coutinho charged.
In other neighbouring Constituency development works, infrastructure improvement is also quite visible to the naked eye, unlike in Margao, Coutinho lamented.
“It becomes natural for Madgaonkars to point fingers at Margao MLA Digamber Kamat for the substandard work. Therefore, to become clear, the MLA needs to demand a white paper on all the works executed in Margao and call for verifying all the works completed, Coutinho said. Kamat should demand a report to confirm the quality and present state of the executed works. And further, undertake repair and restoration of the defective works at the cost of the defaulting Contractor, SCM demanded.
