BANGALORE: The BJP on Friday alleged that there had been large-scale corruption in the Bangalore Mahanagara Palike (BMP) during the last seven years of Congress rule and urged Chief Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy to order a Corps of Detectives (CoD) inquiry into it.

A day after the term of the BMP Council ended and an administrator was appointed to the civic body, BJP city unit president B.N. Vijay Kumar told presspersons that the Congress-controlled BMP had executed several substandard works during the past seven years. The CoD should be asked to probe these "substandard" works, he said.

Asked to specify where and when the corruption had taken place, Mr. Kumar said that in the days to come the BJP would prepare a list of the financial irregularities and make it public.

The Congress had accorded priority to developing playgrounds, parks, commercial complexes and markets and it had ignored the projects relating to flyovers, grade separators, pedestrian subways, road-widening, vehicle parking complexes, garbage disposal system and rainwater harvesting, he charged.

In the past five years, Rs. 250 crore had been spent only on development and maintenance of parks. The Capt. Raja Rao Committee had detected corruption in the execution of the Rs. 130-crore road-asphalting package. Though the BMP had spent Rs. 650 crore on asphalting the roads in the last seven years, several roads were still in a bad state, Mr. Kumar said.

Asked why the BJP corporators had not raised their voice against the irregularities all these years, Mr. Kumar said the party had only 17 members in the BMP Council and their views were always ignored.

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