The Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have ratcheted up their campaign to put the government in the dock by seeking to connect Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan’s office (CMO) with the alleged corruption in the acquisition and installation of Artificial Intelligence-enabled traffic offence detection systems spanning highways and arterial roads across the State.
Congress and BJP leaders held back-to-back press conferences on Tuesday to spotlight the controversy centred around Keltron’s lucrative ₹232-crore contract award to a Kozhikode-based private firm with “questionable expertise” in the field. They pegged the suspected loss to the exchequer at ₹100 crore.
Muslim Youth League activists marched with woven baskets in Ernakulam, threatening to mask the cameras if the government hung back from ordering a judicial inquiry.
In Kasaragod, senior Congress leader Ramesh Chennithala said the Keltron contract smacked of bid rigging and cartel formation to favour a particular company over others. He alleged that Keltron violated tender qualification norms by including the “inexperienced” firm, which quoted higher-than-market rates for implementing the scheme. He dared the government to publish documents related to the deal.
In Kozhikode, Leader of the Opposition V.D. Satheesan alleged that the “corruption trail led to the CMO’s doorstep”. He dared Mr. Vijayan to refute the allegations that promoters of the “paper company” that bagged the Keltron contract were operated “behind the scenes” by a close relative of the Chief Minister.
Mr. Satheesan said the public found it strange that the government’s acquisitions and ambitious projects were channelled to the firm for execution.
The firm, predictably, subcontracted the works to other private players, neither experts nor original equipment manufacturers, for a sizeable commission.
BJP State president K. Surendran said the “paper company” that bagged the Keltron contract had a close relative of the Chief Minister on its board of directors. BJP leader Sobha Surendran named the person and charted his family relationship with Mr. Vijayan.
The government was yet to respond to the specific allegations against the CMO. It had earlier ordered Keltron to hand over contract-award details, other allied documents, and bidding process specifics to the Vigilance and Anti-Corruption Bureau. It also tasked the Principal Secretary, Industries, to conduct an internal enquiry.
The Motor Vehicles department had conceptualised the remote traffic enforcement network to fix accountability on offenders without flagging down their vehicles or fining them on the spot.
Instead, the surveillance web, linked to MVD control rooms, would blitz road safety violators with electronic traffic tickets on their mobile phones and e-mail along with photographic details, time and location of their offence.
