45,000 MCD employees fake?

Weeding Out Non-Existent ‘Staffers’ Could Save Rs 1,000cr A Year

Ambika Pandit | TNN

New Delhi: Harried Delhiites have long fumed that MCD doesn’t work. Here’s probably why: 45,000 employees on its roster, who have been drawing salaries, have gone missing!
An elaborate exercise by the civic body to build a biometric identification database of its employees has opened a can of worms. About 85,000 employees have registered, while 45,000 are not traceable.
It gets worse.

According to a senior corporation official, though these numbers add up to 1.30 lakh, the total number of employees could be up to 1.75 lakh, which means the number of missing staffers could double.

This workforce, a big section of which exists only on paper, thrives on a Rs 207-crore monthly wage bill.
That such a scam could be perpetrated for years so brazenly in the civic body of the national capital puts a huge question mark over the functioning of the corporation, its officials and the political wing.

It would be naive to think that there is no complicity and that this could have gone undetected all these years without an all-pervasive rot.

The corporation’s vigilance department and the state government’s anti-corruption branch, it seems, were not so vigilant after all.

It was Commissioner K S Mehra’s decision three months back to extend the biometric identification system, already operational in Town Hall, to all the 12 zones of the corporation that blew the lid. The phantom employees never registered. ‘‘July 15 is the deadline for all the employees to register and after that only those who are registered will get their salary,’’ Mehra told TOI. He refused to comment any further.

A senior official said the scam is most rampant in the sanitation and horticulture departments where salaries are drawn by supervisors against ATM cards of non-existent safai karmacharis and gardeners. The official, who didn’t wish to be quoted, said weeding out of these names could yield a saving of Rs 500 crore to Rs 1,000 crore annually.
MASSIVE DRAIN
85,000 staffers have registered for biometric identification system, 45,000 are missing
Sources say number of fake MCD employees could be even more
July 15 deadline for staff to register if they want their salaries

MISSING CORPN OF DELHI

Vasant Kunj resident smelt a rat in 2004

Dipak Kumar Dash I TNN

New Delhi: While revelations about MCD’s ghost employees — particularly in the sanitation and horticulture departments — might have come as a shock for many, resident welfare associations (RWAs) in the capital had more than an inkling about it for long. So much so that many had demanded that salaries of sweepers and gardeners should be paid after their attendance was endorsed by the RWAs.

A resident activist had even nailed the rot in the MCD in 2004 after filing an RTI seeking details of the gardeners deployed in his pocket.
Anil Sood, secretary general of NGO Chetna and a resident of C-1, Vasant Kunj, recalled he filed the first RTI in May 2004 as his colony parks were severely neglected. ‘‘I asked how many gardeners were deployed in our pocket and what were their duty hours to which they said three full-time gardeners were on duty,’’ he said.

In a revealing submission, the MCD said gardeners were working from 9am to 5pm in the pocket and in the logbook, one tubewell was being operated 4-5 hours daily.

‘‘The three gardeners were drawing Rs 6,500 salary each. I even sought the fathers’ names and residential addresses of the three gardeners to verify them. But they didn’t provide anything more,’’ Sood said.
Finally, he wrote to the lieutenant-governor seeking a high-level inquiry and the LG marked an investigation to then municipal commissioner Rakesh Mehta. Later, the MCD marked a copy of the findings of the inquiry to Sood, which said that the gardeners were marking their attendance in D-3&4 and they were working as per the directions of their ‘‘superiors’’.

About their salaries, the corporation said salaries were being paid as per their attendance verified by the supervisory staff. The corporation also submitted that though the pump was working 4-5 hours a day, it did not receive any electricity bill and no payment had been made till then. ‘‘To hide their lie, they even claimed to have got a certificate from a resident that said the condition of parks and working of the gardeners were satisfactory. Though we challenged the authenticity of the endorsement, they never paid any heed,’’ Sood said.

CORRUPTION BLOOMING IN MCD

MCD in denial mode, cites ECS payment

Ambika Pandit | TNN

New Delhi: Senior MCD officials have acknowledged that an elaborate exercise to enrol the MCD staff for biometric identification has revealed that over 45,000 employees are missing. They simply didn’t turn up — it’s feared that most of them don’t exist. But a day after TOI exposed this shocking state of affairs in the civic body, many officials and their political masters were in a state of denial.

Leader of the House Subhash Arya said since the corporation was paying all its employees through the electronic clearance system, there was no question of there being any ‘‘ghost employees’’. He, however, failed to mention how supervisors were withdrawing salaries of many of these nonexistent employees by using their ATM cards. This seems to be common knowledge.

The MCD is paying its employees through the electronic clearance system (ECS). This means that every employee should have a bank account which is not possible to create without an identity and address proof. Hence MCD says that all its employees are accounted for. But officials clam up when asked for a figure. No one is willing to state how many employees the corporation has or hazard a guess.
Arya was defensive.

‘‘We are in the process of implementing the biometric system of attendance and there are still 15 days left for employees to get themselves registered. Any conclusion can be reached only after all heads of departments and zonal heads certify that all employees under their charge have registered.’’

‘‘Secondly,’’ he added, ‘‘the finance department will have to say that the salary is being paid as per certification by the heads of departments and zones. Finally, the firm undertaking the biometric work will have to certify that they have enrolled each and every employee according to the list provided by the heads of department and zonal chiefs.’’

MCD Commissioner KS Mehra too told TOI that any inquiry or action on the matter will be ordered only after the exact number of employees is established.

About 85,000 employees from various departments of the corporation have registered under the biometric system so far. Of this figure, 50,000 are in the sanitation department, 11,000 in engineering, 18,000 in health and 7000 in horticulture.
ambika.pandit@timesgroup.com