Risky business
The Benaulim- Cavellossim road has become a motorist’s nightmare due to its narrow width compared to traffic density with no serious effort being made to broaden it while allowing individuals to construct structures and fancy compound walls alongside without any setbacks along the road periphery. Merciless digging of the tarred road for laying water pipes and HT cables sans proper repairs has made the road into a death trap for the motorists. This road has the unique distinction of having demonic speed breakers of vague specifications at every market, schools, cross roads and bends that by the end of the drive motorists risk having a broken backbone and hemorrhoids. PWD instead of concentrating on repairing, widening and hot mixing the road is today engaged in indiscriminate cutting the tarred road to construct ill planned cross drainages. Reliance Jio has also had their share of the abuse of the road for laying their tower cables. Citizens wonder whether this road will be ever repaired or simply wait for elections hoping for a coat of hot mix as an election bonanza!
Allwyn Jorge, Carmona
Money matters
In Goan administration, there exists a time tested system, called pre-audit of payments, whereby all payment bills are thoroughly scrutinised and pre-audited before payments are finally authorised by the Directorate of Accounts. This system pre-empts illegal inadmissible and inaccurate claims submitted by subordinate drawing and disbursing officers spread over several government establishments.
Recently, there was a startling report published in local media about a lower division clerk in-charge of preparing salary bills of employees of some government departments, who fraudulently claimed salary of five ghost employees and pocketed the proceeds to the tune of Rs. 28.00 lakhs. He did so continuously for the period from 2014 to 2016 through the medium of direct benefit transfer system of salary payments. These fictitious claims remained undetected both in the originating office as well as in the Directorate of Accounts for more than two years before it was finally detected by an alert auditor in the Directorate of Accounts at Panaji.
The fraud calls for a thorough review of the computerized pre-audit system and also the direct benefit transfer system of salary payment in the respective government departments. Though simplification of procedures and facilitation of quick payments are desirable, these cannot happen at the cost of compromising the important functions of the pre-audit system which are primarily designed to pre-empt illegal, inadmissible and inaccurate claims of money.
Rodney De Souza, Assagao
Just a farce?
The just concluded DefExpo may have been a windfall for the hotel/taxi lobby but for the general public it was just another misdemeanour. People of the neighbouring villages were left parched for water as it was diverted to the expo using booster pumps, unprecedented traffic jams were the order of the day with a large percentage of the police force being deployed at the event site. It was utter chaos at busy intersections like old market in Margao ,Navelim , Nuvem etc with minimal or no traffic police to man these junctions, not to mention of the serpentine queue of vehicles from Sirlim to the event site. In case of a medical emergency one can imagine the trauma the patient will go through in making it to the nearest hospital. Goa, with the state of its present infrastructure, is not capable of hosting an event of such magnitude.
Lucas D’Souza, Verna
