Aurangabad Municipal Corporation clears outstanding bills of contractors worth Rs 12cr

AURANGABAD: In a bid to speed up the developmental work in the city, the cash-strapped Aurangabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) on Friday released outstanding payments of the contractors. It said the work of all the pending projects would resume from November 9.
It has released bills of those contractors who were aggressively agitating for it. The contractors have stopped working for the past two months as the civic body was delaying the payments.
Assistant municipal commissioner Sanjay Pawar said of the total outstanding amount to the tune of Rs 19 crore, the civic body has cleared payment worth Rs 12 crore. "We have addressed the demands of most of the contractors and they have assured to start offering their services from Monday," he said.
Work on all under-construction white topping roads will also resume from Monday, he said.
"We have introduced a new method of releasing payments of the contractors. The funds were directly transferred into the bank accounts of the contractor concerned through right time gross settlement system. It is quite transparent and fast," he said.
Pawar claimed that the AMC is the first civic body in the state to start the e-payment facility.
As many as 200 AMC-recognised contractors have been boycotting work from September 25 after the civic body failed to clear their bills. This has disrupted the civic body's routine maintenance work of drainage system, streetlights and road repair.
To a large extent, the AMC is dependent on these private contractors for the repair of leakages in drainage system.