The Andhra Pradesh Crime Investigation Department chief N Sanjay at a press meet held in New Delhi said that the TDP and its leader Nara Lokesh’s assertion that the Andhra Pradesh Skill Development scheme had trained around 2 lakh youth is misleading. “We are talking about a particular financial year and that is 2015-2016. Our case is only about the outflow of money in that year. In other subsequent years the Andhra Pradesh State Skill Development Corporation (APSSDC) had released money and training programs were conducted with other companies.
“The scheme went on as the Corporation released money. In 2015-16, Rs 371 crores was released to DesignTech Pvt Ltd. of which they spent Rs 130 cores on the project, around Rs 70 cores for software and Rs 60 crore for hardware. Our question is about what happened to the remaining Rs 241 crore?” the CID chief asked.
APSSDC had signed an agreement with a consortium consisting of the companies Siemens India Software India Ltd and Design Tech Systems Pvt Ltd (DTSPL) to train unemployed youth to make them employable. The Additional Advocate General P Sudhakar Reddy claimed that this agreement was not even signed properly by the three parties and crucial details like the Government Order which sanctioned the project was left out.
The main point of contention between the TDP and the Andhra Pradesh CID is over the commitments made by the three parties in the agreement. The CID maintains that the 90% contribution by the consortium was bogus and that the two companies did not make any contribution.
The CID chief and Advocate General insisted that public money had been looted by Chandrababu Naidu by convincing his cabinet that the project was worth 3,300 crores and making it seem that the government was cutting a good deal by providing just 10% of it.
The officers also said that the Central Institute Of Tool Design did not do any third party evaluation but they merely presented a report based on information given by Siemens India. “The Principal director of CITD, Shujayath Khan in his statement said that he was not aware that he has to independently review the evaluation and went by the information provided by APSSDC and the SISW employees,” the CID chief said.
They also questioned why the APSSDC released Rs 371 crores in a matter of three and half months even when bureaucrats raised doubts. The releases of funds to DesignTech by APSSDC were done on the following dates according to the AP CID
5.12.2015 - Rs. 185 Crore.
29.1.2016 - Rs.85 Crore
11.3.2016 - Rs.67 Crore.
31.3.2016 - Rs. 34.25 Crore