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Cover Story
An insider who did not shut his eyes to public loot and an outsider who just wouldn’t give up
Warrior duo that sunk Ajit Pawar
Yogesh Naik and Yogesh Sadhwani
Posted On Wednesday, September 26, 2012 at 04:37:03 AM
Posted On Wednesday, September 26, 2012 at 04:37:03 AM
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You may not have heard their names, known their faces or seen them hogging the limelight in television debates. But it was the sheer tenacity and doggedness of Vijay Pandhare and Anjali Damania in unearthing one murky detail after another that has resulted in NCP strongman Ajit Pawar finally resigning as the deputy chief minister in connection with the Rs 35,000 crore irrigation scam. Pawar, who was the minister for irrigation in the state for the majority of the last decade, was accused of approving irrigation projects worth more than Rs 70,000 crore, most of which was inflated cost that went into contractors' pockets. Worse, most of these projects didn't even take off - the area under irrigation in Maharashtra increased by just 1 per cent in the last 10 years. Though Pandhare, 57, and Damania, 42, who learnt about the scam in different ways - he was the chief engineer at the Maharashtra Engineering Research Institute in Nashik, and no irrigation paper passed without his knowledge, and she lost her farm to the state, spurring her to get to the bottom of things, their goal was the same - to bring the dirty and the corrupt to justice. Last year, while Pandhare wrote to the Maharashtra governor and the chief minister detailing how the exchequer was being swindled, Damania tirelessly began frequenting the lower offices and painstakingly putting together all the documentary proof about the scam. Throughout, Pandhare, 57, and Damania, 42, were faced with a lot of hurdles, especially as the establishment began to close in on them. While Pandhare was sought to be discredited as someone who has lost his mental balance, Damania lost her farm that she loved and cared for over 18 years to the state. Visibly upset by these efforts, Pandhare, an irrigation department chief engineer, said on Tuesday that Pawar's resignation has vindicated his stand. "People who have known me over the years know well that I am a very sane person. Even Medha Patkar knows about my investigations,'' he said, smarting under the efforts to paint him as insane. The Nashik police on Tuesday posted security personnel at Pandhare's office and residence as a preventive measure. "We are keeping a close watch on his residence and workplace to prevent any untoward incident," said Kulwant Kumar Sarangal, police commissioner, Nashik. Damania, who spent the evening running from one news studio to another, could not hide her excitement. "Pawar's resignation is just the beginning," she said. "We welcome it. We want a thorough investigation into irrigation scam. And till the time the investigation is completed, we want Sunil Tatkare, state water resources minister, also to step down or be removed," she said. She believes that there is a lot of work left. Her priority now is to get documents about all the 70 dams that are currently being constructed in the Konkan Irrigation Development Corporation region. "We have complete details of nine dams," she said. "We have favourable orders from the state information commissioner directing the KIDC to give us all the documents pertaining to the projects. The KIDC, however, has been dilly-dallying. Once we have all the papers, we will be able to expose how there is scam in each and every project in this region." Her ultimate goal is to get all those involved in the scam behind bars. "We will now push for a CBI inquiry into the scam. In fact, we want all the papers so that we can tell the investigators about issues that need to be probed," she said. She should know a thing or two about how the state machinery works. Just in the last few months, she brought irrigation projects worth Rs 5,000 crore to a grinding halt. In the last few months, she systematically dug up documents regarding various projects, starting with the Kondhane dam near Karjat, and exposed the malpractices in allotting contracts. The figures were startling. The cost of Kondhane dam, for which the government had sought to acquire her farm, had jumped from Rs 56 crore to Rs 328 crore in just a month after the contract was awarded. That's a cost escalation of nearly 600 per cent. Of course, this was done because a local elected representative demanded that the dam height be increased from 39 meters to 71 meters. She filed a PIL in the Bombay High Court and forced the government to cancel the tender for the dam. The establishment soon hit back. The state took away 59 acres of her land, hoping she would back off and abandon the movement. If Damania is the outsider taking the fight to the establishment, Pandhare is the classic insider who just would not be a silent spectator while public money was being looted. In short, he is a serial whistleblower. He has worked in the irrigation department for 32 years and knows every single loophole in the system and how contractors and corrupt officials seek to exploit it. When he was posted in Amravati and Jalgaon, he unearthed irrigation scams in the zilla parishads there. Later, when he was shifted to Dhule district, where he was in charge of quality control, he unearthed similar scams there too. His unbending nature landed him in MERI, where he has been working for the last seven years. But he couldn't be silenced. One of his first reports on Tapi dam, a 600-page tome on the inferior quality of the material being used, was ignored by the state. "When I dug the place, I found wet sand was used instead of cement," he said about his findings on Tapi. "I called the superintending engineer and used an excavator to remove the inferior quality material. In many cases, the work done at sites was of inferior quality and not as specified in the tender." So when he noticed irregularities in the process of awarding contracts and that the cost of the projects rose alarming in a matter of weeks, Pandhare couldn't let it go on. He sat down and wrote long letters to the governor and chief minister with details about the disproportionate cost escalations, the inferior quality of the work and consequences these could have. Thus began the story of how another scam was exposed and how another politician lost his job.
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