Hyderabad: Some officials of the GHMC’s transport and traffic (T&T) wing have been swindling Rs 20 crore in the purchase of road studs and cat’s eyes that have not been used.
The civic body purchased about Rs 20 lakh worth of pavement blinkers, each costing Rs 245. Fake bills were produced for replacing eight lakh blinkers annually. Not a single road stud has been replaced for several years and most of the dividers have been buried beneath the road’s surface because of unscientific road laying.
According to the Indian Road Congress (IRC), the corporation has to instal road studs and blinkers on either side of the roads to caution motorists about the road’s width. The blinkers have to be placed eve-ry 17 metres on both sides of the road. However, due to lack of monitoring and awareness on the part of higher authorities, the officials working in the T&T wing have placed them two metres apart , which includes right, left and centre of the road, for about 6,000 km of road length.
According to highly placed sources, the corporation has not replaced a single blinker since 2006 but official records show that eight lakh road studs were replaced. The existing blinkers and road studs have stopped working in 99 per cent of the roads.
A senior GHMC official commenting on the issue said that an internal inquiry will be conducted and criminal cases will be booked against officials if they are found guilty. He said that in 2017 the T&T wing was decentralised and handed over to the maintenance wing by then GHMC commissioner B. Janardhan Reddy. Even after two years, the T&T wing has not submitted records and the decentralisation process has not yet started.
