Gurgaon: A Rs 13-crore door-to-door waste collection contract of the MCG is staring at serious allegations of financial irregularities after councillors on Thursday claimed that sanitation agencies staged vehicle deployments during an official inspection to conceal glaring shortages, raising the spectre of a scam involving public money.What was meant to be a routine verification of vehicles deployed under the six-month sanitation contract has instead triggered allegations that contractors presented borrowed and non-operational vehicles to inflate numbers, even as residents continue to grapple with inadequate garbage collection across the city.The contract requires five private agencies to deploy 591 vehicles for door-to-door waste collection for eight zones. Councillors who participated in Wednesday’s inspection said the actual deployment fell far short of the 369 vehicles presented by contractors.Ward 11 councillor Kuldeep Yadav alleged that against a mandated deployment of 125 vehicles for zone 2, only 55 were produced during inspection and of those, only around 25 were actually engaged in waste collection operations, with the rest allegedly arranged merely to inflate attendance. “This is a big scam and should be probed,” Yadav said.Councillors said that if contractors are being paid for vehicles that are not actually on the roads, it amounts to a direct loss to the public exchequer.Similar allegations surfaced from zone 4. Ward 8 councillor Naresh Kataria, also present during the inspection, alleged that the contractor sublet eight vehicles arranged by his ward instead of deploying its own fleet.“In zone 4, 41 vehicles were supposed to be deployed but only 35 were present during inspection. Of these, eight actually belong to my ward. We arranged them because there has been no arrangement from MCG. We have even marked those vehicles as ‘Ward 8’,” Kataria said. He alleged that vehicles belonging to Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) were also seen during the inspection.“This entire exercise appears to be a sham and deserves an independent investigation,” he added.The allegations have renewed scrutiny of MCG’s decision to award a short-term six-month contract, with several councillors arguing that such limited tenures discourage contractors from investing in dedicated fleets.Ward 15 councillor Bharti Harsana said the shortage is evident on the ground. “Waste collection is a basic civic service and we face residents every day. If they provide even 25 vehicles for my ward, it would be sufficient. Instead, we are getting only seven or eight vehicles, which is nowhere near adequate,” Harsana said.Some councillors defended the contractors. “They need time to mobilise vehicles since they got the work order only on July 9,” ward 18 councillor Jyoti Zaildar said.Residents, meanwhile, questioned the logic of that defence, pointing out that if contractors spend weeks mobilising equipment under a contract that lasts only six months, a substantial portion of the contract period would lapse before the promised services even begin.Separately, mayor Raj Rani Malhotra convened a meeting on Thursday and issued a stern warning to the agencies, saying any contractor found violating contractual conditions or failing to deploy the prescribed number of vehicles would face penalties and possible blacklisting. “I have directed officials to provide ward-wise details of all waste collection vehicles, including registration numbers, agency names and contact details, to councillors to facilitate continuous monitoring at the local level,” the mayor said.
