This is my understanding of the process from the informal talks that I had with GHMC officials and a bit of searching on the web.
The normal procedure for any relatively big repair (more than a lakh) seems to be the following:
- First, the EE (executive engineer) of the ward in which the road is damaged, inspects the area and takes stock of the status of the road.
- Then, they create a work order and make an estimate according to their internal guidelines (there are some GOs which talked about the norms for estimating work based on current costs). My guess is based on the amount, they might have internal reviews on the work within the municipality(such as the revies with Dy Commissioner of the municipality to which the ward belongs or the commissioner of the zone)
- At this point, they send it for approval to GHMC (remember, GHMC has finite budget and it is approved from a central place. ie, there is no ward-wise or zone-wise budget). Hencee, depending on the “perceived importance of the issue and the cost”, the work might be approved.
- Then, the work is posted and an online tender is called for. This is typically done by the ward EE (executive engineer) of the municipality.
- There would obviously be a process around the tender such as inviting bids, going through them, approving them, security deposits, checking background of contractors etc and finally one of the bids will get approved (most of the AP departments use http://eprocurement.gov.in/ for this purpose)
- The work is then awarded to the lower bidder
- Then the work is done by the contractor with periodic inspection from the officials of the ward/municipality/zone
This is obviously a complex process and there are bound to be execution issues at various points.
Hope this throws some light on how GHMC functions. Though GHMC might have a lot of internal audit and review mechanisms, it will help if citizens are aware of these processes and take more interest in the functioning of their wards. This would also act as a feedback mechanism to the officials and help them in prioritizing of the issues.
In my next post, I will touch upon the structure of GHMC