A contractor from Belagavi district was found dead after making allegations of corruption against a minister in the Basavaraj Bommai Cabinet, who has since stepped down. K.V. Aditya Bharadwaj and Rishikesh Bahadur Desai explore the issues surrounding the death and the larger rot in the system that it exposes.
A contractor from Belagavi district was found dead after making allegations of corruption against a minister in the Basavaraj Bommai Cabinet, who has since stepped down. K.V. Aditya Bharadwaj and Rishikesh Bahadur Desai explore the issues surrounding the death and the larger rot in the system that it exposes.
Hindalga in the border district of Belagavi is one of the most picturesque villages in Karnataka. The hamlet, which is within 20 km of the Western Ghats range, is home to around a thousand people as well as an early 20th-century heritage prison where some of the country’s most notorious criminals, including death row convicts, are incarcerated.
After a century, the postcard village recently celebrated the local temple fair for which it got a makeover. Its patchy roads were re-laid amidst a slew of development works. But these very projects that the villagers had enthusiastically welcomed appear to have cost one of its residents his life. An alleged suicide of a resident of this little village has blown the lid off the underlying rot in the larger system.
A short stroll from the prison leads to ‘ Kanasu’ (dream), a newly built house in Samarth Nagar. This is where 40-year-old Santosh Patil, a civil contractor and Hindu Yuva Vahini leader, planned to live. Before moving into the house that embodied his dreams for a prosperous future, he had planned to host a house-warming ceremony on May 3, which marked the Basava Jayanti this year. Unfortunately, that future was cut short. Patil was found dead in a hotel in Udupi on April 12.
A desperate letter to the PM
Six weeks prior to his death, Patil had written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi complaining about the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led Karnataka government’s delay in releasing ₹4 crore towards 108 civil works for the village. It had been executed without work orders, allegedly on oral assurances from then Rural Development and Panchayat Raj (RDPR) Minister K.S. Eshwarappa, in the run-up to the temple fair. In the letter, he alleged that Mr. Eshwarappa’s ‘agents’ were demanding bribes to clear the bill. He warned the Prime Minister that he would be left with no option but to end his life if the bills were not cleared.
When Patil went public with the letter, Mr. Eshwarappa claimed the contractor had not carried out any works in Hindalga, and filed a defamation case against him. Days before his death, when Patil spoke to The Hindu, he recounted how he, along with a delegation of BJP workers from Hindalga Gram Panchayat, met Mr. Eshwarappa and asked him to re-lay roads in the village prior to the Lakshmi Temple fair. “The Minister immediately asked me to start the work and assured me that he would take care of regularising it by issuing work orders and clearing the bills when it was completed,” Patil had said at the time.
When asked if he was aware of the risk of verbally agreeing to such a large undertaking without due process, the contractor claimed that it was how government works were executed. “After all, I was a member of the ruling party. What could go wrong?” he said.
A group of policemen standing in front the lodge in Udupi where Santosh Patil was found dead on April 12.
| Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
Nagesh Munnolkar, president of the Hindalga Gram Panchayat, who led the delegation, concurred with Patil’s version of what transpired in the meeting. Roads in the village had been re-laid, though he had subcontracted the works. Concerns had been raised about the quality of the roads. Patil told The Hindu that he had paid a “commission” of around ₹15 lakh to various middlemen. He alleged that despite this, Mr. Eshwarappa and his agents were demanding more commission without clearing his bills. While his wife, Jayashree Patil, said she was unaware of all the details, she confirmed that her husband often spoke about the Minister and his agents harassing him for kickbacks. She admitted that he sold her jewellery to take out loans from acquaintances.
Through it all, Mr. Eshwarappa and the RDPR Department he headed at the time denied that they had anything to do with this. Both claimed that no work orders were issued. However, last week Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai clarified that henceforth no project will be executed without work orders. “Works were being taken up on oral instructions, particularly in rural local bodies,” he said, without specifically citing this case.
Contractors say that at any given time, nearly ₹400 crore—500 crore worth of works are ongoing in the State without work orders and on oral instructions of Ministers or MLAs. Santosh Patil’s multiple meetings and appeals to central BJP leaders in Delhi failed to resolve the impasse. Apparently hounded by creditors, he took his life on April 12. But he left a WhatsApp message to his friends holding Mr. Eshwarappa “directly responsible” for his death. He called for the Minister to be appropriately punished.
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Though Mr. Eshwarappa – a Hindutva hardliner and controversial Minister – tried to brazen it out, he was forced to resign on April 15, reportedly after a nudge from the BJP’s central leadership.
Until Patil’s death, the ruling BJP had been riding a two-month high on the continuous religious polarisation in the State that began with the hijab controversy and soon spread, with their strategic support or silence, to the economic boycott of Muslims and ban of loudspeakers in mosques and other religious institutions. Patil’s suicide came as a jolt, redirecting the public’s gaze back to allegations of corruption, shoddy roadwork and other problems that had been drowned out by back-to-back incidents of religious polarisation.
It resurrected an unprecedented submission made by the Karnataka State Contractors’ Association in July 2021, to Prime Minister Modi that in Karnataka “40% kickbacks” were being sought for contracts awarded by the State Government. The petition, made public in November later that year, had failed to gain traction in the public discourse.
In the aftermath of Patil’s death, the association announced members would stop work for a month in May if their concerns – eradication of corruption in tenders among others – are not resolved by then. They also warned that they will release “proof of corruption” against at least five to six Ministers and 20-25 MLAs from the ruling party.
D. Kempanna, president, Karnataka State Contractors’ Association, termed the incumbent BJP government as historically the “most corrupt” in the State. Taking commissions on contracts is an old practice, but it was in the range of 5-10%. That changed when the BJP came to power in 2019, with commissions ballooning to nearly 40%, he alleged. “Since 2019, corruption under this regime is both quantitatively and qualitatively on a different scale. The impunity of Ministers, MLAs and bureaucrats under this regime is outrageous,” he said.
Workers of the Congress and BJP clashing during a protest in Shivamogga on April 13.
| Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
In an unprecedented turn of events, contractors are forced to pay a commission of 5% before the contract is even awarded to them, and 25-30% before starting the work. Another tranche is paid again to clear the bills, taking the kickbacks to around 40%, the association’s July 6, 2021 letter to Prime Minister Modi alleged.
“Never were we expected to pay a commission before our bills were cleared. Now we are expected to pay before the tender is awarded, before starting work and bills are cleared,” R. Ambikapathy, vice-president of the association said.
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To add to their woes, the State government has accumulated “never-before” levels of pending bills, estimates of which vary from ₹25,000 crore to even ₹75,000 crore. “Bills for all works undertaken since 2020 are pending, some even older. This has steeped most contractors in a debt trap. At least 10 have ended lives, apart from Santosh Patil since 2019,” Mr. Ambikapathy claimed.
“With nearly 40% kickback, 12-18% Goods and Service Tax (GST) and 10% contractor profit, what remains to carry out civil works is only 30-40%, which is further affected by the rising prices of fuel, building materials and labour. What is the quality of work we can do? What assets are we building for the State?” Mr. Kempanna asked. “With the pandemic’s stress on the State’s economy, successive Budgets’ capital outlay has been less than impressive and i
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