Surat: Even when the nation was under lockdown with people hardly venturing out of homes or breaking parking rules, Surat city traffic police shelled out Rs 37.8 lakh as hiring charges for tow-away cranes in a period of two months. What’s more, in the first three phases of unlock, police paid Rs 82.79 lakh when there were barely sufficient numbers of citizens on the road! In all, traffic police paid a whopping amount of more than Rs 1.2 crore for a total of 22 cranes hired from a contractor in the past five months.
The payments also include the month of July when traffic police observed three weeks of no-fine days as part of their ‘i-follow’ campaign from July 7 and vehicles were not towed away from no-parking areas. Despite assistant commissioner of police, planning and administration, A P Chauhan raising serious objections to the payment, the crane providing agency was paid even for July.
In his letter, Chauhan stated that the payment should not be made as the cranes were not used during the campaign, but these were overruled by deputy commissioner of police, traffic, Prashant Sumbe.
These details were gathered by activist Sanjay Ezhava through RTI applications in which he alleged that money was wrongly paid to the contractor even when towing activity was almost nil. He further alleged serious discrepancies in maintaining log-books.
Senior traffic police officials claim that the towing cranes were utilized for shifting of detained vehicles, while some were kept as stand-by and a few others were used for transporting relief material like food, sanitizers and other products.
“They have shown in log-books that at many places they detained vehicles when there was almost zero vehicle movement in the city. In a few cases the log-books are left blank to make entries later. While in some cases they just mentioned patrolling or bandobast instead of the number of vehicles detained,” Ezhava alleged.
“Over and above the payment for July, if traffic police’s claims are to be believed, discrepancy of Rs 53.9 lakh still exists as per the log-book data,” alleged Ezhava, who has sent his written complaint to city police commissionerate, directorate of anti-corruption bureau, home department, chief minister and Lokayukta as well.
“The allegations are baseless and the cranes were in use for shifting of over 37,000 detained vehicles seized by police for violation of lockdown. These cranes were also used for transportion of food, protective material, barricades and others as well during lockdown when the towing of vehicles from no-parking was discontinued,” said Sumbe.
He further said that during the ‘i-follow’ campaign, these towing cranes were kept on stand-by as it is an emergency service and so, the department had to pay for the services.