Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) organisation secretary R.S. Bharathi has moved Madras High Court alleging huge corruption in award of government tenders to private companies for laying fibre optic cables in 12,524 villages in the State.
The petitioner has sought for registration of a First Information Report (FIR) on his complaint against Chief Minister Edappadi K. Palaniswami and Minister for Revenue, Disaster Management and Information Technology R.B. Udhayakumar.
According to an affidavit filed by the petitioner before the court, the Centre had conceived a project titled BharatNet to bridge the digital divide between urban and rural localities and provide broadband connectivity to all village panchayats in the country.
Under the project, it was envisaged to provide connectivity to 12,524 village panchayats in Tamil Nadu. The Chief Minister informed the Assembly that the project would be implemented through Tamil Nadu FibreNet (TANFINET) Corporation, a special purpose vehicle.
In December 2019, tenders were floated for four different packages — A, B, C and D worth ₹350 crore, ₹550 crore, ₹550 crore and ₹500 crore respectively. The total worth of the project was ₹1,950 crore and a pre-bid meeting was held for it in February this year.
However, subsequently, two private firms including one which had bagged a similar contract in Telangana, began taking utmost efforts to get the project in Tamil Nadu through undue influence and by tweaking the tender conditions, he alleged.
Hence, the then I-T Secretary Santhosh Babu and TANFINET Managing Director M.S. Shanmugam were pressurised to award the contract as per the wishes of the Chief Minister and the Revenue Minister, the petitioner alleged further.
“Since both these officers were not agreeing to their dictates, it is believed that they were transferred,” the litigant claimed and pointed out that a corrigendum was issued on April 15 increasing the eligibility criteria for participating in the tender process.
“When the people of Tamil Nadu were panic stricken about COVID-19, the corridors of power at the State secretariat were busy making changes to the tenders issued on December 5, 2019 and December 6, 2019,” the petitioner claimed.
The corrigendum increased the turnover requirement of the bidders exponentially in order to favour a select few, he said and pointed out that the new conditions required a sole bidder for package A to have an average annual turnover of ₹405 crore for the last three financial years.
The new requirement was way high compared to the original requirement of having a cumulative annual turnover of ₹405 crore for last three years, the petitioner said and claimed that similar corrigendum were issued for other packages too.
Such outright anti-competitive clauses were introduced to keep a majority of the bidders away from the tender process, he said and sought for a direction to the Directorate of Vigilance and Anti-Corruption to register a FIR on the basis of a complaint lodged by him on May 11.