BENGALURU: Rs 620 crore Bangalore Safe City Project, planned to make urban spaces safe for women and children by installing 7,500 surveillance cameras throughout the city, has unleashed an intense round of claims and counterclaims among Karnataka‘stop bureaucrats and policeman officers.
The project, which is in the tendering phase, was involved in a controversy Bengaluru City Police complained to Chief Secretary TM Vijay Bhaskar that an “unauthorized person” had attempted to access classified information related to her.
Saturday morning, IPS official D Roopa she wrote to the Chief Secretary (CS) indicating that she had intervened in the matter in her capacity as Secretary of the Interior after the Additional Chief Secretary (Department of the Interior) Rajneesh Goel handed over the file on the project to study.
When contacted by STOI, Chief Secretary Bhaskar said that Roopa was ‘Secretary (PCAS), Home Department’ and not the Head of the Home Department.
Just hours after Roopa’s letter was made public, Goel responded and asked him to provide him with a copy of the government order or written instructions stating that if any of the responsibilities of implementing the Bengaluru Safe city The project had been entrusted to him.
This follows a complaint made by Bengaluru’s Additional Police Commissioner Hemant Nimbalkar, who is also the chair of the invitation and scrutiny committee for the Center-funded Safe City Project under the Nirbhaya Fund, to the CS.
The complaint indicated that an official, who was not related to the project, had contacted the two project consultants on November 7 (before the tender was uploaded) and was seeking details about the previous RFP that was canceled, the status of the new RFP, the process followed for the current RFP and other details.
In her letter to the CS on Saturday, Roopa stated: “I am the Secretary of the Interior and there is no identity theft as falsely alleged in Nimbalkar’s complaint. The file on the Safe City project was given to me by the additional chief secretary of the interior department for my study. While I was studying I found serious irregularities in the wording of the tender. ”
Goel, however, told STOI: “This is not about giving her the file and authorizing her to speak with the consulting agency.”
In his response to Roopa, Goel stated: “I have reviewed the Safe City Project notes available in the home department. The file has never been flagged to you and also does not contain any observation / comment made by you. Please let me know if you have written any comments on file or if you have raised any issues to CS notification or mine. ”
Goel sought to know from Roopa what had prompted her to call the representatives of the project consultants for confidential information on November 7 and wanted to know if she had sent any reports to him or the secretary general or any other authority before calling. to project consultants.
Roopa, who claims to be a whistleblower, said that Nimbalkar should be removed as head of the Safe City Project in view of “such biased and unfair bidding.”
“I am a public servant governed by rules. I do not want to react to social media posts, WhatsApp messages …”, said Nimbalkar.
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