The two-member delegation at the meeting at Patna Municipal Corporation office on Friday. Picture by Deepak Kumar

Patna, March 11: Employees of Patna Municipal Corporation were left in an embarrassing position today when no administrative official turned up to receive a team of foreign delegates who visited the corporation on behalf of Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Development Innovations Group (DIG), USA.

According to sources in the corporation, municipal commissioner Divesh Sehra has been sent to Bengal for two months for Assembly election-related duties.

In his absence, an under-prepared mayor, along with a few ward corporators, had to greet the visitors who were in the city as part of their monitoring tour before starting welfare work for the urban poor in Indian cities.

Additional commissioner, who has been given the charge of PMC commissioner till an interim arrangement is made, remains busy with routine affairs.

“Today, when the talks were on, the PMC workers were agitating over the payment of outstanding salaries. He (additional commissioner) could not take out time for the important meeting,” said a visibly embarrassed official of the corporation.

“No administrative official was there to apprise the delegation members of the plight of the poor people living in the corporation areas. The mayor and deputy mayor know very little about the facts and figures and I doubt if anything substantial was discussed in this meeting. This is an embarrassing situation not only for the PMC but also for the state government. However, the state appears to be too thick-skinned to take these lapses seriously,” said Suneel Kumar, a ward corporator.

While mayor Afzal Imam claimed that he, along with his colleagues, apprised the two-member team of the housing, sanitation, water supply and drainage-related problems that plague the slum areas of the city, his detractors were least impressed.

“A translator had to be arranged for the meeting as none of the PMC representatives could speak English. The corporators who attended the meeting could barely give factually correct information that the delegates wanted to know. They should have ideally made a presentation on the issues but they were not at all prepared for the meeting,” said a source in the civic body.

Imam, meanwhile, said the team had been given all the information they required and now it was their call to decide whether they wanted to give any aid to the corporation. “We have been told that these agencies are carrying out a survey in few cities in the country and they will select some corporation areas for the welfare work. They have not promised anything yet,” he told The Telegraph.

Eric Adams, associate director of international housing finance, DIG, refused to divulge outcome of the meeting.