Click to play videoTawang (Arunachal Pradesh): A CNN-IBN special investigation has unearthed that flood victims in Arunachal Pradesh's Tawang district were promised grains but the flood relief never made it.
The current and the former chief minister of the state, it was found, were the men most directly responsible and the prime beneficiaries of a scandal worth crores.
Bills worth Rs 68 crore, claimed as carriage charges for trips that were never made. Dorjee Khandu was relief and rehabilitation minister in 2004. His department gave a contract for transporting 2.5 lakh quintals of rice to RD Carriage, a firm owned by his nephew Jambey Tashi.
The contract given without inviting tenders and Khandu himself admits that procedures were not followed.
“Yes I gave contract to my men. If the government tender notification is to come out it will take minimum 45 days and then a long procedure. In the meanwhile, what will happen to the requirement of the people in need?” he asked.
What's worse is that RD Carriage is not even a registered firm. When we went to check its official address in Itanagar's C-Sector, we found no sign of the company, no board or office.
Here is how the scam worked - It costs Rs 125 per kilo per kilometer to transfer rice using porters. By truck the rate is just Rs 3.
To raise profits, RD Carriage claimed head load charges even for places connected by motorable roads.
CNN-IBN: How were the things transported?
Tsering Tashi, local villager: They were brought by trucks.
A map shows the routes for which head load charges were claimed by RD carriage. But we found well-constructed roads along each of these routes.
Despite perfectly motorable road connecting Tawang and Surbhi, headload charges of 15 lakhs have been realized by R.D Carriage. Why is this so?
When RD Carriage did claim truck charges, the rate, at 84,000 rupees per truck was 3 times more than the market rate.
“One quintel hai is Re 1. So nine tonne is around Rs 26,000,” said N Rice, Senior Manager, Tawang Co-operative Society.
Khandu's own district Tawang was given the maximum rice allocation of 55,000 quintals which would have needed at least 650 trucks. But Tawang has never seen so many trucks.
“In the whole of Tawang there would not be 40 trucks,” said N Rice, Senior Manager at Tawang Co-operative Society.
To cover the scam, Dorjee Khandu appointed temporary relief rehabilitation officers.
This is a list of 14 such appointments. It is alleged that these officers were told to approve the inflated carriage charges bills.
If these bills are to be believed, every person in Tawang District now has enough rice for the next two years. Yet Chief Minister Khandu has managed to get clean chits from all internal inquiries so far.
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