Consultant faces BMC music

The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) will stop payment to IL&FS, the consulting company working on the Gorai dumping ground project, until the inquiry against it is over.

The decision was taken following an uproar in the standing committee meeting on the faulty calculations of carbon credits generated from the Gorai dumping ground.

On Saturday, DNA had reported how the consultant had given an escalated estimate to the BMC in its project design report.
Civic officials will conduct an inquiry into the wrong estimate given by the company about the generation of methane gas after the scientific closure of Gorai dumping ground. “The consultant calculated the figure on the basis of the data provided by the BMC. But they failed to identify the ‘dead’ garbage. The Gorai dumping ground could generate only 14,477 certified emission reductions (CERs) as against 2,74,500 CERs to be generated till December 2011,” said Mohan Adtani, additional municipal commissioner.

The civic body is supposed to pay back the CERs to the Asian Development Bank to bridge the gap. “We have asked the consultants to return the fees and have asked it to give us free service to buy carbon credits from the international market on our behalf. We have warned them of the consequences of failing to do so,” added Adtani.

On Monday, the standing committee members demanded that the consultant be blacklisted, the agreement with it be cancelled and the company penalised.

Rais Shaikh, Samajwadi Party leader in the BMC, said the civic body should discontinue services of IL&FS. “How can any sensible consultant compare garbage from Mumbai with those in European and western countries since their garbage does not have debris, silt or plastic?” asked Shaikh.

Manoj Kotak, a senior BJP member in the standing committee, suggested that the consultant be told to return the fees and its services discontinued from other projects.

In 2008, before the project took off, IL&FS estimated the figure without verifying the ground realities of the nature of garbage and the production of methane gas that was to be tapped.