After years of saying no, the Defence Ministry agreed last week to send all its civil and mechanical contracts—under the ambit of its Military Engineering Services—for a vigilance scrutiny.The Ministry’s green light comes after Central Vigilance Commissioner P Shankar wrote a formal letter to Defence Minister George Fernandes last month reminding him about the long-pending request.Said Shankar: ‘‘Since all defence purchase files are now being examined by us, there was no reason why work contracts should be left out. We want to see if systems are being followed and I’m sure we will find out several cases in which things are not what they were intended to be.’’The MES is the biggest construction agency in the country, due to the sheer volume of work: all construction of defence establishments from offices to residential quarters as well as roads within defence establishments.As a result, it’s responsible for contracting, sub-contractors as well as overseeing all maintenance work of existing establishments.On earlier occasions, the MoD refused to part with any information on MES contracts saying the audits done by the Additional Director General (Technical Inspection) unit were enough. This audit anually covered around 8,000 MES contracts while the actual contracts MES entered into was even higher.However, M P Juneja, CVC’s Chief Technical Examiner pointed out these audits were carried out from the point of view of a quality and technical audit and not a vigilance angle.‘‘We cover work contracts of 580 Government departments and there is no reason why MES contracts should not also be examined,’’ Juneja said. ‘‘We will now design a plan for inclusion of MES contracts in our technical inspections,’’The CVC now has eight technical teams to evaluate all Government contracts and sample surveys have led to contractors refunding or paying up over Rs 16 crore this year.In March last year, the CVC completed its confidential report on defence deals and after that the Defence Minister had announced that henceforth, all purchase files will be scrutinised by the CVC.Once details of defence purchases began pouring in, the CVC was able to prevail upon the MoD that there now nothing sacroscant about MES contracts either. ‘‘In our view, there is nothing different between a PWD contract and a MES contract,’’ says Shankar. ‘‘They should face the same scrutiny and technical examination. Our idea is to make the quality of inspection better.’’
