Consultancy or corruption?

At last there is a talk of development in the corridors of power and meetings are taking place to clear developmental projects. After the Commonwealth Games the developmental activity in Delhi was almost shut down. Basically, there were two reasons for this inertia – one was starting up of investigations into several Commonwealth projects and the other was lack of funds as most of the funds had been consumed during games.

The first reason was major as from ministers to bureaucrats, every one was busy preparing answers for several investigating agencies. While I would not say that all of them were clean, neither would I say that all of them corrupt. The engineers who worked day and night to make the games successful were facing the allegations and I know few of them who gave their everything to ensure the success of the games and these were the ones who were now reluctant to take any initiative.

Anyway, the drubbing of the ruling Congress party in the MCD elections has helped in breaking this inertia and now the Sheila Dikshit government is very aggressively taking up developmental activity. But whenever there is any developmental activity we see the role of the consultant.

For last two decades a new trend has come up and that is the appointment of a consultant for every project. The consultant charges a handsome amount and as far as I know give very little in return as most of the government engineers are not only far more experienced but also know the pulse of the city far better. If we go into the details of the projects, we will find that an average of about 2 per cent of the project cost goes to consultants. For example there is a project 'Yamuna Interceptor Project' and the cost of the project is Rs 2200 crore and the consultant of this project is charging Rs 122 crore for the consultancy.

The irony is  that most of the retired engineers are either consultants or are working in some consultancy companies. As a layman, I fail to understand what extra qualifications these consultants posses in comparison to the working engineers. Why do we have to pay the huge 'extra' amount to these consultants when the government is already paying handsome salaries, courtesy the Sixth Pay Commission, to the working engineers. Is consultancy a new way of helping our 'own' people or is it a corruption by another name? Please, we had enough in the name of outsourcing and consultancy and now the government should be realistic and spend the taxpayer's money more judiciously.