NEW DELHI, NOVEMBER 26 If the issue of subcontracting is not taken up with urgency, the entire project will be a big failure both in terms of quality of construction and timely completion: this was Satyendra Dubey, writing to his bosses.A full year after his murder— tomorrow is the first anniversary of the death of the young NHAI engineer who complained to the Prime Minister’s Office about corruption along a Bihar stretch of the Golden Quadrilateral highway project—his warning rings true.

The CBI, which filed a criminal case on the basis of corruption charges levelled by Dubey, says it estimates the loss to the national exchequer could well be Rs 100 crore plus on just the 80-km stretch (package V-B running through Bihar and Jharkhand) Dubey was working on.

Two months after it filed a case against NHAI officials and private contracts and raided premises, a CBI team in Koderma is sifting through piles of contract documents. Investigations show that other than the immediate case, they may have others as well.

What some of the documents with the CBI reveal is precisely what Dubey had said: ‘‘The phenomenon of subletting and subcontracting is known to everyone in the NHAI from top to bottom but everyone is maintaining a studied silence.’’

CBI teams have detected that sub-contracting was not only done in violation of NHAI guidelines—rules allow sub-contracting only to the extent of 10 per cent of the contract—but even file notings, made by Dubey and some of his colleagues on the poor quality of work, were ignored.

When the CBI filed the FIR on September 26, the value of sub-contracting was pegged at around Rs 100 crore. But officials working on the case now say they have evidence that work worth over Rs 200 crore was being sub-contracted.

Officials say that this is because the cost of material and equipment had not been calculated by principal contractor L&T-HCC who had signed a joint venture with NHAI for the GQ work.

According to CBI officials, there’s evidence to show that though the principal contractor sub-contracted a majority portion of the Rs 434-crore contract, they retained a margin of around Rs 100 crore.

In its FIR, the CBI initiated criminal proceedings against three persons for allegedly ‘‘engaging unauthorised sub-contractors with much lesser price and got sub-standard work done for which the NHAI had paid much more as per the contract agreement for the said roadwork and they obtained undue pecuniary advantage for themselves.’’

Officials say that while they have established the pattern of unauthorised sub-contracting, they are now turning the spotlight on the aspect of poor work quality.

The CBI is getting samples of the works carried out by the sub-contractors—Bharadwaj Construction Company of Hazaribagh and ECI of Hyderabad—and will get these tested by road construction experts.