MUMBAI: The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) believes in rewarding its contractors with more work even if they do sub-standard work .

The BMC has awarded contracts worth over Rs 3900 crore to a handful of contractors in the last two years, most of these contractors have been penalized or even filed police cases for fraud.

A few contractors have been blacklisted or downgraded by other BMC departments for sub-standard quality of work.

These contracts have been issued for road repairs, footpaths, concretization of roads. These contracts don’t include the ones given for pothole repairs and repairs to bridges.

Some of the works done since 2013 have been washed away in the rains leading to potholes and bad patches, infact some of the contractors who were awarded contracts again in 2014 have been fined for poor quality of work in 2013.

According to data accessed from the BMC there are only 10 contractors who have been bagging road contracts in the BMC, despite most of them having been fined for poor work in the past.

Contractors who have registered different firms under different firms have bid for projects and bagged them despite the BMC trying to include an integrity clause in the contracts which bar contractors who have stakes in other firms to not bid through multiple companies.

Sources in the BMC say that most of these tenders are rigged or are drafted in a way that only a few firms should be eligible.

“The system of awarding contracts in the roads department has been made so complicated that these handful of contractors identify the loopholes and bag the contracts. For every one contract to be awarded the department changes the specifications several times, most of the time this is done to accommodate the demands from the contractors,” said a civic official.

BMC officials say that they have tried to bring in big contractors for construction of roads, but even their entry has been blocked by the system that works in the BMC.

“A big infra firm will not want to visit every political leader to get this project cleared that only the contractors who work in the BMC can do. Small things like getting traffic police permission to start work won’t be managed by big firms, BMC contractors have seasoned to deal with these issues and so they can only survive in the BMC,”said another official.

Samajwadi Party corporator Rais Shaikh said, “The BMC rather than punishing them for poor work has been awarding more contracts to firms whose work is not upto the mark. Why can’t the commissioner blacklist these agencies? Why is the BMC wasting public money so irresponsibly.”