Its efforts to handpick projects for CAG audit may have landed Delhi government in a bigger soup. Delhi government sources say they have now been asked by CAG to furnish details of all projects undertaken between 2005-06 to 2009-10 a far cry from just the 25 projects that the chief secretary had suggested CAG should look into to finish their probe on time. Audit officials, according to sources, have also asked for the project paper of MCD’s controversial coffee home-cum-toilet project in which public land worth several hundred crores was handed over to a private agency for a period of 30 years that the government had arbitrarily delinked from the Games.
Talking about the CAG decision to expand the scope of the probe, a senior official said: “We have been asked to give details of all projects whether they are related to the Games or not. This would entail much more paperwork than we had originally budgeted for, particularly as according to the recent directive, all matters related to CAG have to be routed through the department heads.”
The decision to review projects from five years ago which applies also to projects of NDMC and MCD sources say, was taken after the realisation that around that time, a lot of projects were floated with a real or imagined CWG tag to them which was the ticket to easy funding at that point. “Even if the projects were delisted later, the fact remains that the funding had been obtained in the name of the Games. So CAG is perfectly within its ambit if it wants to audit all these projects for the Games exercise,” explained an official.
Last week, Times City had written about three DJB projects worth more than Rs 500 crore that had been launched with the intention of providing water to conference centres in Dwarka that were to come up for the Games.
Officials meanwhile say CAG has also asked for all documents of the coffee home-cum-toilet project which had been taken off the list of CWG projects by the Delhi government of its own accord on the plea that there was just public land and not public money involved in it. The project which was floated by MCD, that had gathered criticism on several counts was being monitored by the empowered committee headed by the chief secretary that was created for the express purpose of the Games but does not seem to qualify as a Games project as per Delhi government’s definition of it.
“It was an MCD project, so we are asking for the relevant documents from the civic agency,” said a senior official.
