From Our Correspondent
TURA, May 23: In another shocker for the PHE stable under the aegis of the Jal Jeevan Mission (JJM) in Meghalaya, an embankment, which was completed close to two years ago, has broken in half, corroborating the substandard work that was undertaken.
The collapse comes despite there being no water held by the embankment and no reports of any form of floods in the entire Garo Hills region for more than three years now.
The matter of the dam being damaged, reportedly due to substandard work being done, was raised by the Chibinang unit of the GSU, who, after receiving complaints from the villagers, paid a visit to the site to witness first-hand the damage that had been done.
The project in question is the under construction JJM project at Romgre under Dadenggre.
As per the data available on the dashboard for various projects in the state, the Romgre JJM water project is expected to benefit 249 households.
The dashboard also states that out of the 249 households in the Romgre and Romgre Songgital, 219 households have been connected through functional household tap connections with only another 30 remaining to be connected.
Going by the dashboard numbers, the per household cost of the project runs over Rs 20 lakh.
However, from the site of the damage as well as reports by the NGO, not even one household has been connected through taps.
“You can see from the embankment itself that no pipelines have been drawn as yet so where did the connections to households suddenly come into the picture? The data is falsified by the department in question and begs the question, why,” felt unit president, Amit Marak.
What is even more interesting is the fact that the overall cost of the project is a whooping Rs 50-plus crore of which the contractor has been allowed to withdraw over Rs 44 crores of the amount without doing any work to ensure the households were connected through functional household tap connections.
The state of Meghalaya, as per the latest dashboard data for JJM, has completed close to a whopping 78 per cent of functional household tap connections with fully functional water supply.
However, going by the data on the ground, someone is definitely making a fool of residents of the state of Meghalaya through the falsification of data.
Earlier, the department, in many cases including major projects in Nekikona near Rajabala, Tikrikilla GWSS among others, had data that was skewed beyond belief. This was put down to a data entry error. However, despite the error being known to all, no attempts were made to correct the same. This only meant that the dashboard data and data on the ground never coincided to provide the actual facts.
If one takes just these three projects as samples, the skewed numbers in the end could be gargantuan.
What has also been alarming is the PHE department, which has been in charge of these projects, is hesitant to provide information, even under RTI on the tender process as well as the names of contractors.
Even in the case of the Romgre project, the SDO of Phulbari, under whom the project falls, did not bother replying to calls or messages sent to him, raising even more questions on the complicity of the department.
The icing on the cake is the fact that inspections done by a ‘third party’ of these projects has raised more issues than answers, which is even more worrying for those who want to talk of water management and its development.
“The department has to take stock of what has taken place and we demand that an inquiry into what took place be undertaken. We only want that the people are given their due under the project. However, a lot of what has taken place does not make sense and needs a larger enquiry. A dam cannot fall without any form of natural calamity without it being poorly constructed,” felt Marak.