AAP In Soup: Crores Siphoned Off In The Name Of Construction Workers, Investigation Reveals

An initial investigation into the working of the Delhi Building and Other Construction Workers Welfare Board has opened a news can of worms, spelling more trouble for the AAP government in Delhi.

As per reports, the department registered 9 lakh people as construction workers between 2018 and 2021. Out of those workers, 2 lakh names appear to be bogus and exist only on paper.

65,000 names share the same mobile number while 15,747 have the same local residential address.

The Delhi government had announced a scheme during Covid to help the construction workers survive during the complete lockdown. A sum of Rs 5,000 was to be deposited in their accounts. This exercise was repeated several times, sometimes on the pretext of halting construction activities due to rising air pollution in the capital.

More recently, the AAP government announced a deposit of Rs 5,000 in the accounts of over 10 lakh construction workers in Delhi as it banned construction activities. A sum of approximately Rs 500 crores is to be spent on the scheme, said a Delhi government statement.

However, the current revelation has brought the scheme under the scanner for financial irregularities and crores of rupees being siphoned off in the name of labour welfare.

The BJP launched an attack on the AAP government over the allegations.

BJP National Spokesperson Sambit Patra termed it the biggest corruption case in India as far as construction workers were concerned. He said three NGOs working for construction workers had filed a complaint about duplicate registrations and alleged massive corruption in their registration through proxies.

Patra accused the Delhi government of siphoning money meant for the welfare of construction workers and spending it on AAP's party-related works.

Delhi Building and Other Construction Workers Welfare Board under the city government's Labour department is primarily responsible for registration of construction workers and its welfare initiatives.

The board formed under Manish Sisodia has Rs 3,000 crore as corpus fund for this year.

(with inputs from PTI)