page_title: Mafia Raj
section_title: Contractor mafias
hierarchical_section_title: Mafia Raj / Contractor mafias
caption_attribution_description: Delhi-Gurgaon stretch of National Highway 8 (NH-8) has been modified into an eight lane expressway. This has increased speed of traffic between Delhi and its suburb. The expressway provides speedy access to Indira Gandhi International airport. The national highway leads upto Mumbai in West.
context_page_description: Mafia Raj refers to a criminalised nexus of government officials, elected politicians, business interests and other entities.
  In India it can refer to cities, states, government departments, public sector businesses or entire sectors of the economy that are subject to these conditions. Due to the ability of these mafias to operate their illegal activities in a sustained fashion, sometimes openly and with the use of violent intimidation, terms like Goonda Raj, Jungle Raj and Anarchy are used to refer to the same phenomenon.
  In the Indian and Pakistani media, the mafias are usually mentioned by the name of the economic sector in which they are involved. Terms such as coal mafia, timber mafia, contractor mafia and land mafia are commonly used.
  The state-owned coal mines of Bihar were among the first areas in India to see the emergence of a sophisticated mafia, beginning with the mining town of Dhanbad. It is alleged that the coal industry's trade union leadership forms the upper echelon of this arrangement and employs caste allegiances to maintain its power.
context_section_description: Many state-funded construction activities in India, such as road building, are dominated by construction mafias, which are groupings of corrupt public works officials, materials suppliers, politicians and construction contractors. Shoddy construction and material substitution (e.g., mixing sand in cement while submitting expenses for cement) result in roads and highways being dangerous and sometimes simply washed away when India's heavy monsoon season arrives.
  In a widely covered case, Satyendra Dubey, a project director with the National Highways Authority of India, was murdered in 2003, allegedly because he had written a letter exposing deep-seated contractor mafia involvement in the construction of a section of the prestigious Golden Quadrilateral project to the prime minister's office. Although a CBI investigative report after the assassination stated that there was no contractor mafia involvement in Dubey's murder, his family and supporters maintained that an attempt at a cover-up was being made.
  Attempts have been made to reduce mafia influence by making construction tendering processes more transparent, sometimes by attempting to move them online, so that a complete audit trail of bids and activity is maintained. Construction mafias are alleged to have used their political influence decisively to frustrate many such attempts, for example, in the public works for which the Municipal Corporation of Delhi is responsible.
caption: Public works, such as road construction, are sometimes dominated by contractor mafias.
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