Jaipur: Public health engineering department (PHED) has issued notices to six engineers of the department, including a retired engineer, for alleged involvement in a scam of Rs 150 crore. Officials said these engineers reportedly gave Operations and Maintenance (O&M) tenders to two firms for more than 900 tubewells in Jalore district when they were entitled to O&M of only 20 tubewells.“We took up the issue with PHED minister Kanhaiya Lal Choudhary. Following his instructions, we are going to take major steps against these accused engineers. We will also lodge complaints with police in this regard,” disclosed a senior PHED official Wednesday. An official of the department claimed that the accused—then executive engineers Umesh Kumar Meena, Shyam Bihari Bairwa, Jitendra Trivedi, Hemant Kumar Bairwa, Ashish Dwivedi (retd), and Hemant Kumar Vaishnav—gave the work orders for O&M of 981 tubewells on Aug 12, 2022, to two firms—MM Construction and MS Raj Enterprise.“In gross violation of norms, the then superintendent engineer of the circle issued this work order for 981 tubewells. The two firms should have got work orders for only 20 tubewells. For the last three years, the department is unnecessarily wasting money on O&M expenditure for such a huge number of additional tubewells. The department has also blacklisted the two firms,” the official added.Investigation revealed that PHED bore O&M expenditure for around 3,500 tubewells in Jalore for the last three years, when the actual number of tubewells of the department in the district was only close to 1,500.
