Just how bad can the BDA corruption get? The answer is very very bad.
Look at this: The recent online auction of corner sites, which the BDA trumpeted as very successful, was rigged. And the culprits were the town planning agency’s own staff who acted in connivance with crooks.
The scam runs into several crores and came to the fore earlier this week. The BDA’s vigilance wing lodged a complaint with the Seshadripuram police on Wednesday.
The scam comes at a particularly bad time for the state government which had vowed to cleanse the BDA of the bad apples and carried out the widely publicised raids to catch the corrupt.
Looks like none of that deterred the scammers.
The BDA went for the online auction of corner sites in several of its housing layouts by giving such reasons as Covid-19 restrictions, ensuring transparency, breaking the monopoly of middlemen and giving bidders a hotline with BDA officials.
The BDA had put up sites in eight housing layouts for auction: Anjanapura, Arkavathi Layout, Banashankari, HBR Layout, JP Nagar, Nadaprabhu Kempegowda Layout, Nagarabhavi and Sir M Vishveswaraiah Layout. To participate in the auction, bidders had to log in to eproc.karnataka.gov.in, the state government’s public procurement portal.
The e-bidding commenced between December 8 and 15 and closed between December 23 and 30.
The government had hoped the online auction would be so successful that it would get funds for Covid-19 relief works, too.
But the…
