Kerala’s vigilance report on alleged irregularities in a road project linked to the Kerala State Transport Project is still awaited, Public Works Department Minister P K Basheer told the state Assembly on Thursday. The minister said the Vigilance and Anti-Corruption Bureau’s preliminary inquiry remains ongoing and that the government has not yet received its report.
Basheer was responding during question hour to queries from BJP MLAs B B Gopakumar, V Muraleedharan and Rajeev Chandrasekhar about the status of the vigilance probe. The inquiry relates to allegations surrounding a road project undertaken about two decades ago, when Gyanesh Kumar was serving as secretary of the Public Works Department.
According to the minister, the preliminary inquiry was ordered after the government identified discrepancies in an earlier VACB investigation conducted in 2006. The new inquiry is therefore examining both the alleged irregularities in the project and shortcomings in the previous probe, though the minister did not provide a completion date for the current exercise.
Basheer told the House that the alleged irregularities committed by officials caused a loss of Rs 700 crore to the government. The amount was presented as the estimated loss linked to the allegations; the minister’s statement did not establish that the loss had been finally adjudicated or recovered.
The case relates to the Kerala State Transport Project, which undertook a World Bank-funded project worth Rs 215 crore in 2006 to reconstruct the MC Road between Angamaly and Thiruvananthapuram. The contract was awarded to PATI-BEL, a joint venture between a Malaysian company and Bhageeratha Engineering.
A Malaysian company carried out the road work. Its project engineer, Lee See Been, allegedly raised several complaints during construction before returning to Malaysia, where he later died by suicide. The allegations and the circumstances surrounding the project have remained part of the broader vigilance scrutiny.
The project illustrates the long administrative life of infrastructure disputes: a road contract executed years ago can continue to generate questions about procurement, supervision, construction quality, financial loss and the adequacy of the original investigation. In this case, the government’s immediate position is that the current preliminary inquiry must be completed before the VACB report can be placed on record or further action is decided.
The minister did not indicate when the report would be submitted, whether responsibility had been fixed on any individual or whether recovery proceedings had begun. The next formal milestone is the completion of the VACB preliminary inquiry and submission of its report to the state government.
