Indian Express 25.02.2010
No ghost employees, civic body tells HC
Utkarsh Anand Tags : MCD ghost empoyees case, delhi Posted: Thursday , Feb 25, 2010 at 0039 hrs
New Delhi: Less than three months after Municipal Commissioner K S Mehra acknowledged that there are 22,853 employees on the civic body’s payroll who are neither registered for biometric attendance nor attend work, the MCD’s counsel told the Delhi High Court on Wednesday that no employee is being paid without work.
Ajay Arora, counsel for the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD), told the court that the issue of “ghost employees” was blown out of proportion, and that the inquiry initiated by the MCD last November might find there were no such employees.
Arora claimed the discrepancy in attendance was due to the new biometric attendance system introduced by the civic body.
Arora submitted before a Division Bench headed by acting Chief Justice Madan B Lokur that there could be three classes of employees who could not be counted, thereby giving rise to the issue of ‘ghost employees’. According to the counsel, the first category of civic employees who could not be accounted for in the biometric attendance system were “substitute employees” whose data was not fed.
The second category consisted of employees who did not submit forms to get registered with the biometric system, and the third category was those with flaws in their forms, or who failed to give their thumb impressions, Arora told the court.
“All these employees were in existence but could not be accounted for,” he contended. “The matter has been blown out of proportion and the probability is that at the end of the inquiry, we might not find any ghost employee.”
Arora also said, “There is not even a single employee in the MCD at present who is not working but is being paid.”
Arora was responding to the NGO Jagrook Welfare Society’s PIL seeking inquiry by the Anti-Corruption Branch into the allegation that MCD was paying salaries to more than 22,000 bogus employees — mainly gardeners and sweepers.
Besides an independent inquiry, the petition also sought the court’s direction for initiation of a departmental inquiry against the guilty civic officials for their alleged involvement in the scam.
On Wednesday, the counsel sought more time from the court, saying the inquiry by the civic body was on and the conclusions would take some time.
On this, the Bench asked the MCD to submit a copy of the inquiry report within a month in the court and fixed April 28 for further hearing of the case.
Notably, both ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and Congress leaders of the MCD House had last month sought to discredit the issue of ghost employees by asserting that the disclosure had been made in haste and was incorrect. Following the reported disclosure last November, an inquiry into the scam had been initiated by the MCD.
