Daily Times

The Directorate of On-Farm Water Management (OFWM) followed many illegal practices in purchase of surveying equipment worth millions of rupees, Daily Times has learnt reliably.

As per available documents, the directorate has announced the open tender for the purchase of 25 ‘Total Stations’ (surveying instruments) that to be used in the OFWM project in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP). However, serious irregularities occurred during this process to allegedly benefit some favorite private firms. The OFWM aims to use irrigation water in the appropriate way through dams and other sources. According to the directorate, more than 50 per cent of the irrigation water is lost in the delivery phase and during application within the field.

A bidder Shaukat Ali Nadeem and his facilitators participated with two firms named by M/s Sunder Trading Company, Lahore and M/s Asia Geomatics Lahore. Both companies are registered in the name of Shaukat Ali Nadeem and his son Yasir Shaukat respectively.

According to the documents, at the time of tender opening announcement M/s Sunder Trading Company quoted total station model “Sanding ARC9” at Rs 773,000.00 each and stood 1st lowest while M/s Asia Geomatics, Lahore, quoted model “SatLab SLT-1” at Rs 837,786 and stood at 2nd lowest position.

“The tender was awarded to the second lowest bidder with model SatLab SLT-1,” read documents. As per evaluation report prepared by water management department, KP, the 1st lowest bid at Rs773, 000 was acceptable to the OFWM but they placed the order on 2nd lowest bid which raised many questions of biasness and favoritism.

The evaluation report stated that such biases resulted loss of of Rs2073,152 to the government, adding that the origin SatLab SLT-l as Sweden (made in Sweden), whereas SatLab Total Station SLT-1 is made in China, that is the first fraud committed by the bidder.

As per documents, the 2nd lowest bidder who received the order of 25 units has quoted SatLab Total Station model SLT-1, here comes the mega fraud by the bidder. SatLab Total Station model SLT-1 (one second accuracy) does not exist and is not offered by the manufacturer SatLab, Sweden. According to the SatLab website, they only offer SLT-2 which is two second accuracy low cost $ 800.00 total station.

As per available information, second accuracy total station SatLab SLT-2 cost Rs150,000 and any first-second accuracy total station cost Rs 83,7000. Shaukat Ali Nadeem pasted stickers of SLT-1 on SLT-2 total stations and made it first-second accuracy and made an additional profit of 17,175,000.00 by such fraudulent techniques. Moreover, ‘total station’ model: SLT-1 does not exist is further verified from the import data downloaded from the government in the aforementioned investigation.

Likewise, M/S Asia Geomatics, Lahore, quoted a non-existent SatLab Model, SLT-1 accuracy one second (1″), in their bid all the bidder informed the OFWM that SATLAB does not offer this high accuracy ‘Total Station’ yet keeping their own interest in view of OFWM Department deliberately placed the order for non-existent SLT-1.

As per sources, all bidders had also informed the department that STL-1 (1″ Accuracy) Total Station is not available on the website of SatLab yet the Water Management Department did not take its notice for reasons not difficult to understand. Despite repeated attempts, no authority concerned at the OFWM department was available for comments.