Once famous for its infrastructure such as sprawling highways and road networks connected to bridges and flyovers for seamless traffic movements, Gujarat in recent months has got bad press for the collapse of newly built bridges.
Recently, when the State was under a monsoon spell, the videos of cracks in a newly constructed bridge in Surat inaugurated by the Chief Minister, went viral on social media with netizens calling it the “real Gujarat Model.”
“This is the result of institutionalised corruption in awarding infrastructure contracts in Gujarat,” the Aam Aadmi Party said in a release, adding that the Surat bridge, built at a cost of ₹118 crore, started developing cracks within months.
Similarly, when the State was in the midst of the fury of cyclone Biparjoy last month, there was a social media storm when a newly constructed bridge on the Mindola river in the Tapi district collapsed before its inauguration.
After the incident, Gujarat Chief Minister Bhupendra Patel fired the local officials, suspended three engineers, and ordered a probe while blacklisting Akshay Construction, a Surat-based firm which was awarded the contract to build the bridge. “The prima facie probe suggests that low quality material was used in the construction of the bridge,“ the government statement said.
However, these are not isolated incidents. This is a growing pattern in the State, famed for its infrastructure development, where public infrastructure such as newly-constructed bridges or flyovers collapse within a few years of construction due to poor quality construction and workmanship and substandard materials used in building the infrastructure.
In April this year, the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) lodged an FIR against officials of Ajay Engineering Infrastructure Private Ltd. (AEIL) and project monitoring consultant SGS India Private Ltd., the two firms that were involved in the construction of the Hatkeshwar bridge that became unsafe for use in just four years after it was constructed at a cost of ₹44 crore. The bridge is now being demolished by the civic body. The police have arrested four directors of AEIL and two personnel of SGS India Pvt. Ltd.
In another such incident in Ahmedabad in December 2021, an under-construction bridge collapsed during a stress test, in the third such incident involving the company Ranjit Buildcon. A high-level committee looking into the matter produced a damning report about the quality of concrete and construction material used and workmanship.
A dozen incidents
Since 2016, more than a dozen such incidents have occurred, raising concerns about the quality of public infrastructure in the State and also indicating a nexus between contractors and officials and underlying corruption in awarding contracts for public works.
“This is the real Gujarat Model of BJP where there is 40% commission in awarding the contracts for public infrastructure projects,” Gujarat Congress spokesman Manish Doshi said.
A retired technocrat who worked with the State government said Gujarat once had a world-class quality control system for public infrastructure works but that in recent years the quality has deteriorated. “Corruption could be one factor but the main factor is the lack of quality control checks carried out by officials,” he said.
Political nexus
Lately, local contractors with political connections have thrived thanks to the vast resources that the State spends on building infrastructure assets.
As per the Budget presented in March this year, for the next year, spending towards urban development is estimated to increase by 19% to ₹12,639 crore, and about a third of the allocation is towards the Swarnim Jayanti Mukhymantri Shehri Vikas Yojana, a scheme to create basic public infrastructure in cities and towns.
In his Budget speech, the Finance Minister announced that the Gujarat government plans to spend around ₹5 lakh crore on the development of infrastructure facilities in the next five years.
He made an additional budgetary allocation of ₹550 crore for reconstruction and repairs or strengthening of old bridges after the disaster in Morbi where a colonial-era hanging bridge collapsed after repairs, killing at least 141 people last year.
(mahesh.langa@thehindu.co.in)
