KAMALPUR, Sep 8 (TIWN): Another watershed project at sub-division came under scanner for embezzlement. And the case of embezzlement revealed as the authority didn’t provide the names of beneficiaries in RTI response.

The watershed projects were sponsored by the Central Government right from the beginning of the UPA government. The scheme was introduced by the UPA government to ensure development to the people who traditionally depend on water bodies for earning their livelihood.

Such projects provided people with facilities like plantation of financial crops, digging of water bodies, providing cattle, construction of dams for community irrigation and others.

But in the state such projects often came under scanner for embezzlement. In one such project at Noagaon, huge embezzlement was unearthed and the IO was suspended and had to put recovery.

In that context, a citizen filed an RTI with the Salema Agricultural Sub-division authority to know about the project in Mechuria. The project started in 2010-2011 fiscal and ended in 2015-16 fiscal.

The authority provided that, an amount of 67, 00, 000 rupees were spent in the project to provide different facilities to more than 300 beneficiaries. But in the RTI response, the authority not provided the name of a single beneficiary.

Further, such schemes must have an officer as Implementing Officer. But in case of Mechuria, the authority declared that no Implementing Officer was deployed.

However, it got revealed that, as the officer who was appointed as IO got into pension and enquiry would unearth huge embezzlement leading to recovery so the Superintendent tried to save the tainted party-loyal officer.

Now, the local people claimed that, they not got any facility from the project. Even they never heard of any such project in their locality. Now, what steps would be adopted by the higher up officials remained to be seen.