As life in Chennai is slowly coming back on track by collaboration of citizens and efforts by the administration, IAS officer Vijay Pingale’s story has come as bad news for the authorities. Chennai would have avoided the flood fury to a large extent had the authorities there paid heed to the warnings of an honest IAS officer, who had to pay a huge price for acting against  local contractors for their botched up road work in the city a few days ago.

Pingale Was Transferred By Tamil Nadu Govt

Pingale, an MBBS graduate and IAS officer of the 2004 batch, had undertaken several important initiatives in his 16 months tenure as the Joint Commissioner in the corporation.

On November 11, Pingale made public the names of nine contractors who were asked to reimburse the civic body Rs 2 crore for repairs the corporation carried out on stretches laid by them. Pingale had also promised to name other contractors for poor work and said the total penalties were likely to rise.

Pingale’s actions, however, irked the powerful contractor lobby who started building pressure on the political establishment to shunt him at the earliest and he was transferred to the industries department as joint secretary on 14 November.

The real crime

The officials said inferior work by the contractors, who have admitted to forming a cartel to bag contracts from the corporation, as also to using material of poor quality to lay roads because have to bribe Councillors at least 10% of the cost of any project, and corruption at various levels in the corporation had left the city’s roads potholed and broken with the first monsoon rain.

Another corporation official said Pingale had set up a quality control wing in the corporation six months after he joined. “There was resistance to the move because assistant engineers would not be able to make money from contractors if they report poor quality of work,” the official said. “Pingale is an honest man with good intentions but he did not know which strings to play.”

Now, when Chennai is slowly limping back to normalcy after days of flood fury, the officials of the corporation regret the day when Pingale was transferred for attempting to bring more transparency in the civic body.