Chennai: Perhaps inspired by Vijay Mallya, the Greater Chennai Corporation has irked private firms and NGOs who have invested in its projects by delaying, or in their creditors’ words - evading, payment for services offered. In one such case, Karunalaya, an NGO which operates a care facility aimed at rehabilitating run-away, abandoned or orphaned and street children, has claimed that the corporation owes it Rs 12.34 lakh for its part in running the Kannappar Thidal night shelter.
Karunalaya was stripped off the right to maintain and run the facility by the local body after an October 2014 inspection by the corporation’s social audit team and zonal health officer deemed it to have failed on terms of agreement. The NGO claims that the termination was on illogical grounds. But the correspondences sent between the two parties since, which were accessed by DC, clearly shows the corporation declining outright to pay the balance owed to the NGO. That apart, organisation’s secretary Dr N. Paul Sunder Singh asserted that they went over and beyond the call-of-duty by providing education to children in the shelter as well as supplying food to the families staying there.
“There was no one to take care of the shelter after the corporation simply dumped a few families here in 2002. Despite the poor maintenance, we took up the project and for that we have been treated like some road contractor,” said Singh. “We’re in debt. Despite our repeated pleas to release the money, the corporation is not bothered,” he added. According to local body officials, there are holes in the theory proposed by Singh. “The NGO was showing residents of that area as inmates at the shelter. Some of these families were living at the shelter for 13 years which is not what a shelter is for. It is for temporary stay,” said an official.
“The families were cooking their own food too and these people were claiming money for food that they did not make. You can’t just provide us with a local cash bill and expect us to foot it,” an official added. Corporation sources added that the local body was daft to accept the proposal by Karunalaya to run the Kannappar Thidal night shelter in the first place. “You cannot keep entire families at a shelter for 10-13 years. There were no attempts made to provide alternate housing for the families put up there but nor was there any lobbying from the NGO itself. They [Karunalaya] were not an effective lot,” the source added.
The ongoing dispute has not had a bearing on the shelter inmates many of whom were asked to move out to Okkiyam Thoraipakkam by the corporation back in 2014 but resisted as the resettlement would have wrecked their livelihoods.
