Cuttack, Feb. 14: The state government has asked the municipal corporation to recover Rs 8 crore, released for development projects, that had been embezzled over the past decade.

The funds had been sanctioned for projects in various wards of the city. Though engineers of the Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation and other officials had received the funds, the utilisation reports were not available.

The state urban development department issued an order to the corporation on February 5 to recover Rs 8.13 crore.

"The funds had been released for development works during previous councils prior to 2014. Attempts to recover the outstanding amounts are under way," municipal commissioner Gyana Das told The Telegraph.

The embezzlement surfaced after an audit team from the government had detected large-scale irregularities in the funds sanctioned for the projects.

While the utilisation reports that are required to be submitted periodically were missing, the corporation authorities had been window dressing the lapses by presenting such huge amounts as advances against engineers, the report for 2014-15 observed.

The urban development department directed the civic body to file criminal and civil cases under the Odisha Municipal Corporation Act against those, who had received the amount for projects but failed to submit the utilisation reports. Recovery of the missing amount had been recommended in the audit report.

Officials in the municipal corporation's finance division conceded that they had initiated the recovery process by way of issuing demand notices to nearly 200 persons from whom the amount was to be recovered. But, the process was making little headway.

The civic body has being weighing fresh recovery process options following demands by a section in the municipal council. The officials plan to follow up the recovery notices with requests to deposit the amount. If they do not comply, criminal cases would be filed against them.

"What makes the process difficult is that most of the engineers or officials involved had either retired or taken transfer from the civic body," a senior official said, requesting anonymity. "More so, the required documents to support the individual notices are missing in most cases."