Bad roads: Who is responsible- Babus or contractors?
Bad roads: Who is responsible- Babus or contractors?
Soon as the monsoon arrives, the matter of potholes becomes a debatable issue. Even though the contractors and officials boast of completing the pre-monsoon work, the road surface starts showing pot holes soon after light rains. The funds spent on these pre-monsoon projects as well as main projects are huge and deserve proper utilization. After all it is the taxpayers’ money which is used for all these projects. And, therefore, they have every right to question, who is responsible for the bad state of roads, Babus or contractors?
Babus
• Apart from the contractors, there are certain civic departments who need to work in coordination. But most of the times, they don’t care resulting in poor state of roads.
• Babus give the permission to different departments for a job like digging cable for new sub stations and others, just before the monsoon season.
• Even if the officials grant permission much before, they don’t see whether the work is started on time or not. Sometimes the work starts late and doesn’t get completed before monsoon.
• If the contractors are responsible, why don’t higher officials takes a stringent step against those contractors? Just because it is all a planned game of politicians, officials and contractors.
• The engineers from civic department don’t carry out field visits. Even if the price is quoted 15% less than actual cost, officials don’t find it important to find out the reason.
• Contractors do not use good quality material, follow proper process and finish work on time but there is usually no one to actively control that.
Contractors
• Contractors never report if the officials or the civic engineers have got poor engineering skills or are reckless in their work.
• The contractors are more interested in saving 10% to 15% or whatever they can by using the poor quality material.
• There is no proper system which can keep a check on contractors or punish them if they are found guilty.
• Contractors have a clear agenda to pile up funds either by delaying the work or by making poor quality roads so that they can get the pre-monsoon work which can fill their pockets in future.
• It is the nexus of corrupt contractors and officials who together plan out everything and blaming each other is just a part of game.
Conclusion
Ideally, contractors and officials should work in tandem to ensure proper roads which will further ease traffic flow. However, they work in tandem but not to deliver the quality work, instead for filling their pockets by corrupt practices. Contractors and officials just fool around the common men by blaming each other whereas the fact is they both are equally responsible for bad state of roads.
Discussion
- RE: Bad roads: Who is responsible- Babus or contractors? -Deepa Kaushik (09/10/14)
- Yet another discussion with the same root cause, the notorious word that we Indians use the most, Corruption. Yes, we cannot blame a single community for the poor shape of roads during the monsoon. It is the gang of corrupt management and employees operating behind the day-to-day hassle for the common man.
Is that only the babus who are responsible for the bad roads? Babus do get a cut, a share which goes into their pockets to hush up the malpractices during the re-structuring of the roads. With loaded pockets they gain the courage of having a loaded gun with them, but they fail to realize that they haven’t got the licence for the gun.
Babus fail to check the work initiation or the progress. We can hardly find any official performing the field visit before handing the final duly signed document certifying the appropriate work completion. It hardly matters them whether the work has even started or not. If the contractor gives a low cost tender, no official takes effort for the reason for the low-posted tender.
Coming on to the contractors, they are equally guilty and in fact have an upper hand in this task. They are the ones who intake the poor materials and wrap-up the work in the least possible time. In case they lack the labours to complete the project, the roads hang-on with the partial completion throughout the season with nobody to question or punish them.
There is another group to be blamed for all these mal-practices. It is none other than the common man who fails to question these officials and babus. Ignoring the incorrect measures is also a crime. If the common man gets awakened and starts fighting for his rights, we can rectify many mal-practices going on in our country.
