LUDHIANA: Recovery of pending dues from the owners of submersible pumps has brought two departments of Ludhiana municipal corporation (MC) at loggerheads with each other. Where the operation and maintenance cell (O&M) officials have issued the notices to the junior
engineers (JE) of building and road branch (B&R) for slow pace of recovery, the JEs of B&R branch met mayor Balkar Sandhu on Wednesday complaining that they were not given enough time for recovery and now they have been served notices. The mayor however has assured to resolve the issue as soon as possible.
The O&M cell officials had complained that they were facing staff crunch and were unable to recover from the illegal
submersible pump owners at their level as they were supposed to tackle general complaints of water supply and sewerage. They had requested the commissioner and mayor to involve the JEs from B&R branch as well for better recovery. The employees of B&R branch were put on this task. But O&M cell officials started serving notices to the JEs after some days.
On meeting the mayor, the JEs rued that they were asked to conduct survey of illegal submersibles which they had completed and then they were asked to recover the pending dues from the defaulters. They complained that they were even asked to dispatch the bills to these defaulters which is not in their job profile. They demanded that recovery of dues should be done only by employees who are designated for the same.
On the other hand one of the officials of O&M cell said B&R branch officials work only when MC constructs the roads while in other days they remain almost free so they had got them along. He said the notices were served to those JEs who were not performing.
Notably, the survey was kicked off in the month of May and MC had kept a target of detecting at least 20,000 illegal submersible pumps. Now recovery of dues from owners of pumps.
