Ahmedabad: Money that city’s taxpayers pay to keep their streets from flooding every monsoon never reached the ground. Instead, it was quietly pocketed by the very engineers entrusted to fix the problem, investigation has revealed.The Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) has ordered an inquiry into the disproportionate assets of four officials after the municipal commissioner in May visited a site in the East Zone where paperwork showed a stormwater line had been laid. In reality, there was no line.The accused, additional city engineer Rajeshkumar Rathwa besides probationary deputy city engineers Utkarsh Bhabhor, Ramesh Baria, and Alpesh Makwana, all operating primarily within the municipal East Zone zonal office. They were suspended on May 18 under Section 56(1)(B) of the GPMC Act. Of the Rs 3,26 crore recoverable from the accused, AMC has got back Rs 1.6 crore.Their modus operandi exploited the Project Implementation Unit (PIU) structure, which allowed the same officers to both execute and certify drainage work. Bills were cleared for projects that were either never executed or were grossly inflated in scale, with falsified documentation including the third-party project consultant’s inspection reports used to support the claims. Standing committee chairman Kamlesh Patel, confirmed that the “municipal commissioner has now directed the vigilance department to examine the total income and assets of the four accused, to establish whether their personal wealth exceeds what their salaries could legitimately explain”. Beyond the financial recovery, the standing committee has authorised the lodging of formal police cases against the accused. “They created a closed loop where they were both the executors and the supervisors, bypassing routine ward-level checks,” a senior AMC official said. The case adds to a pattern flagged earlier by the vigilance department, including a 2025 instance involving contractor where bills worth Rs 76 lakh were cleared for work scrutinised in the Vastral ward area.
