Restoration and management of Ramsar sites and other wetlands under the recently-founded TN Wetland Mission has run into trouble as the law department has raised concerns about violating procedure in selecting two agenciesAnna UniversityandSaconto draw up proposals and implement projects.
The mission was launched onWorld Environment Daywith much fanfare last year. Soon after, 14 crore was spent to create an inventory and to prepare integrated wetland management proposals. The two institutions were selected and were told to do the work to create management plans and to create Health cards of 13 Ramsar sites and 100 wetlands.
This is to assess water and quality, survey of lake boundaries, identifying encroachments, dumping of sewage and garbage.
However, the state law department has said that the Mission didn’t follow the rules under Tender Transparency Act. Instead of calling tenders, the authorities used the sections that allowed them to grant procurement of Services directly. Now, the officials said, they were hopeful that the approval will be received in a month.
Under section 16 B (b) of TN Tender Transparency Act, they need to justify why a tender was not called. Sacon and Anna University were paid about 4 crore for the proposals. However, officials from the mission confirmed this and said that it was an error in judgement as they wanted to speed up the process.