Chhattisgarh govt cancels Rs 218 crore contracts to former Congress minister’s brother

RAIPUR: Chhattisgarh housing and environment minister OP Choudhary has issued a directive to cancel ten major construction works of Rs 218 crore allotted to ‘Raipur Construction Limited’ owned by a brother of former Congress cabinet minister Mohammed Akbar.

The grounds of revoking the contract of major tasks as cited by the BJP minister was poor quality performance and delay in completing the allotted construction project works, which are mostly to be accomplished under the smart city project in the new capital ‘Nava Raipur-Atal Nagar’ in Chhattisgarh.

“The agreements of Rs 218 crore for 10 major works have been cancelled. The contracts were awarded to an executing agency Raipur Construction Ltd, which is managed by a relative of a former senior Congress minister. The Congress government had been giving extension after extension to the firm that was also served with notices to conclude the given projects in the given target time. But it didn’t comply, so we took stringent action against the agency revoking the contract work orders,” said Choudhary who further added that his government will not tolerate poor quality work of any company or contractors.

To a query that the firm was related to a family member of Akbar, who was earlier the state housing and environment minister in Bhupesh Baghel government, the BJP minister said that it’s a big issue that came to his knowledge and he got the entire thing examined by an internal team before taking a firm decision to cancel the works of Rs 218 crore.

This newspaper learnt that the firm belonged to Mohammed Asghar, brother of the former Congress minister.