The gold chains gifted to the victorious Kolkata Knight Riders have become millstones around the mayor’s neck.

A section of Calcutta Municipal Corporation staff has been grumbling about how the IPL 5 champions were gifted gold financed from the civic coffers while they were denied much cheaper gold-plated chains as reward for helping net Rs 384 crore in overdue property taxes.

“We had worked for about 11 hours a day over three-and-a-half months to make the interest-waiver scheme a success. We were so happy when we learnt that the CMC authorities had decided to reward our hard work, only to see somebody else walk away with the gold,” rued an employee of the assessment and collection department.

But did rewarding the Knights for a superlative showing have anything to do with not rewarding the CMC staff likewise?

“We must remember that the amount raised through the interest-waiver scheme is public money. We cannot distribute it among the employees. Still, I have decided to suitably reward them for the extra service they have rendered,” mayor Sovan Chatterjee said.

The mayor’s choice of a gift each for the 2,000-odd employees is a wristwatch priced Rs 1,200. Under normal circumstances, that might have been humbly and happily accepted. But post-KKR, disgruntled CMC staff don’t see it as a gift worth its weight in aluminium casing, let alone gold.

“The money spent on felicitating the Knight Riders came from the CMC. Each KKR player, the owners and the support staff got a gold chain and a pendant weighing about five bhori (50gm). The bill for 25 chains with pendants was Rs 45 lakh,” a senior CMC official said.

Had the CMC decided to give 2,000 employees a gold-plated chain each, the bill would have been Rs 60 lakh, or barely 0.15 per cent of the Rs 384 crore that they helped recover from property tax defaulters.

“More than anything else, it would have been a morale booster for us,” a deputy secretary in the CMC said.

Although no formal announcement had been made about gold-plated chains as reward, the buzz in the CMC corridors was that the bosses were contemplating such a gift.

When mayor Chatterjee heard the suggestion, he apparently shot it down immediately. Someone suggested cellphones as an alternative, but that didn’t meet the mayor’s approval either. The CMC brass finally settled on the gift for all occasions — a branded wristwatch — with an estimated outgo less than half of what 2,000 gold-plated chains would have cost.

“We are more hurt than angry. After all, it’s not everyday that the CMC rewards its employees for a job done well,” said a clerk.

Recorded instances of civic employees being offered special incentives for their work date back to a different century. “In 1830, when the superintendent of police was entrusted with the duty of collecting outstanding house tax, he was offered a commission of 2.5 per cent on the amount. In 1901, there was a system of monthly bonus for the collectors based on the collected amount,” states a document from the CMC archives.

Records state that the first collector of the corporation, Babu Dakshinaranjan Mukherjee, was paid Rs 400 as monthly salary and a commission of Rs 1.5 on every Rs 100 collected as tax.

“That was 1840. This is 2012 and the mayor is making it look like he’s doing us a favour by giving us a wristwatch each,” sniped a senior official in the accounts department.

Whoever said silence is golden surely hadn’t been denied a gold-plated chain.