MCD discards ghost employee issue

Less than three months after Municipal Commissioner K S Mehra acknowledged that there are 22,853 employees on the civic body’s payroll who are neither registered for biometric attendance nor attend work, the MCD’s counsel told the Delhi High Court on Wednesday that no employee is being paid without work.

Ajay Arora, counsel for the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD), told the court that the issue of “ghost employees” was blown out of proportion, and that the inquiry initiated by the MCD last November might find there were no such employees.

Arora claimed the discrepancy in attendance was due to the new biometric attendance system introduced by the civic body.

Arora submitted before a Division Bench headed by acting Chief Justice Madan B Lokur that there could be three classes of employees who could not be counted, thereby giving rise to the issue of ‘ghost employees’. According to the counsel, the first category of civic employees who could not be accounted for in the biometric attendance system were “substitute employees” whose data was not fed.