The abrupt transfer of three senior engineers of Patna Municipal Corporation (PMC) has brought the civic body’s drive to identify all commercial holdings in its area to a grinding halt.

Around 20 days ago, the PMC decided to identify all commercial holdings under its area, to boost revenue collection.

The civic body has already asked the state government to provide more engineers to the cash-strapped corporation. Around 91 per cent of the posts for engineers in the corporation are vacant.

PMC commissioner Pankaj Kumar Pal said: “The civic body started a survey to identify commercial holdings under the supervision of senior engineers, including chief engineer Ramswarath Singh, about 20 days back. However, the move was stopped recently after three of the monitoring officials were transferred back to their parent departments.

“There are over 2.5 lakh commercial holdings in the corporation area according to our estimate. However, according to the present records, the number is between 25,000 and 30,000. This implies that most of the holdings are either registered as residential holdings or are not registered at all. We wanted to get a detailed survey done to prepare a detailed list of all commercial properties so that we could collect the revenue accordingly,” Pal said, adding that the transfers have stopped the work, about 20 per cent of which was done.

“We are working with only 9 per cent of the sanctioned engineers on board. That makes it very difficult to carry out any project till the last mile,” Pal said.

The corporation has requested the urban development department to lend some engineers immediately to carry out various projects, including the survey of commercial holdings.

Sources said the present situation arose because of no recruitment of engineers in PMC in the past 30 years and its compulsion to depend on borrowed engineers from other government departments, including irrigation, public works and road construction.

Apart from an acute dearth of junior engineers and assistant engineers (see chart), the corporation functions with only two of the 10 sanctioned executive engineers. Even chief engineer’s post is vacant.

Pal admitted that acute shortage of manpower has resulted in huge revenue losses to the corporation. “In the last financial year, we managed to collect 89 per cent of total revenue target — about Rs 28 crore — and most of it came through holding taxes. We need Rs 76 crore annually just for paying salaries to our employees.”

The commissioner said PMC was in a “very bad shape” and “we cannot better the situation if we do not increase our revenue generation.”

He added that because of acute dearth of employees, the civic body “is not even in a position to carry out a house-to-house survey to identify the latest number of holdings”.