Bending rules to line their pockets!

Ongole: Officials have reportedly lined their pockets, taking advantage of a government order that they could outsource staff to beat the problem of staff crunch in their respective departments.

According to reliable sources, a number of officials have created outsourcing agencies and are dipping their hands into the government till, inflating the number of workers hired and paying less than the amount prescribed by the government.

The state government has allowed departments including Housing, Roads and Buildings (R and B), District Rural Development Agency (DRDA), District Water Management Agency (DWMA), Panchayat Raj engineering, Mahatma Gandhi Natioan Rurla Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) to appoint temporary staff on project to project basis.

It asked the officials to appoint outsourcing agencies to supply manpower whenever required at the site of the work. The government pays the outsourcing agency as agreed in the contract, which should pay the outsourced employee for his work.

The agency will make sure that the outsourced employee is qualified as per the requirement and maintains a register and attendance. The in-charge government official, under whom the out-sourcing employee works has limited liability and just makes sure the work is done by him. There are allegations that the seniors and retired officials in the departments are taking advantage of the outsourcing agencies.

They are learnt to have had their benamis establish the agencies and are passing verbal orders to make sure the ground level staff submits reports that a full complement of engineering assistants had worked in all days, though 50 per cent of them are not appointed.

After the salaries bill is credited to the agency with allowances if any, they are paying just a nominal portion of the agreed salary. For instance, Panchayat Raj Engineering department has been asked by the government to conclude contracts with outsourcing agencies and gave the powers for the same to deputy executive engineers.

The DEEs should make sure that all terms and conditions prescribed by the government are followed and verify that the technical assistants or site engineers supplied by the agency work under assistant executive engineers. The executive engineer is the authority to verify the records submitted by the DEEs and release the salary bills.

In Prakasam district, there are six deputy executive engineers. To carry on projects in the special works division, the government allowed the DEEs to conclude a contract with outsourcing agencies. The Parchuru and Santhanutalapadu DEEs concluded the contract with SVS Placement Agencies, Vijayawada while the DEEs of Addanki and Darsi entered into the contract with the Srinivasa Engineering Services, Vijayawada.

Though the two agencies are from Krishna district, they submitted labour department certificates issued at Ongole and the DEEs accepted the certificate. The DEEs also accepted the core test results from the agencies, the certificate of satisfactory standards issued by the civil engineering professor at Prakasam Engineering College. As everything seem to be perfect, the executive engineer paid the salaries to a woman’s account, rather than to the agency account, following the request of the in-charge of the agencies.

When The Hans India inquired into the matter, the deputy commissioner of labor in Prakasam district B Yesudas agreed that the labor certificate for the agencies from Vijayawada might have been issued in a hurry. The DEE of Santhanutalapadu Y Koteswara Rao and DEE of Addanki KV Raghavaiah agreed that they know the two agencies have no valid address at Vijayawada and they belong to the same person.

They said that they followed the orders of the senior officials and accepted that they did professional mistake and said they were ready to face action by the department. G Deva Karunakar, technical assistant at Darsi and D Sai Kumar, technical assistant at Korisapadu mandal of Addanki division said that they are receiving only Rs 10000 per month instead of the agreed Rs 14532 per month.

They said that some of the technical assistants are not qualified and the agency is cutting the Rs 4532 for maintenance. B Srinivasa Reddy, the assistant professor in Prakasam Engineering College, Kandukur said that he didn’t issue any satisfactory certificate of standards to any agency after conducting the core test. He said that his name and signature might have been be forged.

NV Ramana Rao, the new executive engineer of the Ongole division, said that he had found discrepancies in the records and felt proper method of execution of contracts was not followed. He said that the former executive engineer passed bills from April to September 2017 to a total of Rs 23.5 lakh to a woman’s account instead of the account of the agencies.

He said that he stopped the payments to the agencies from October 2017 and submitted a report to the superintending engineer and other higher officials at the head office to look into the matter. The action on his report is yet to follow.