According to sources in the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation, target of Rs 70 lakh have been set for the AMC, police department and the district collectorate, which includes the district panchayat. Given that they are not equipped to sell anything, the diktat means that these officials must use coercion, itself an unpleasant task, or sell on the promise of returning the favour later.

Not surprisingly, then, several senior officers as well as field officers in the AMC have proceeded on casual leave to spare themselves the task of selling the tickets.

The job must go on though, so in a rare display of organisation the corporation has settargets to individual departments. Sources said the Town Planning Department was given 30 per cent of the tickets, the Engineering Department 25 per cent, Health and Octroi 10 per cent each, Property Tax five per cent and the rest distributed among the other departments.

It doesn't stop there; health inspectors have reportedly been asked to contact licenced shops and restaurants existing in the city, while octroi officials are contacting big-time dealers. The central office, which invites and allots tenders, has been asked to contact contractors.

As expected, it hasn't been easy going; one officer said he was finding it difficult to push the tickets through to the dealers and those who had bought tickets had done so only because he was an AMC official.

The murmurs of protest among the ticket buyers were first raised on Tuesday when Prakash Rochwani, a member of the Ahmedabad Sweet and Milk Dealers' Association, alleged that corporation officials were forcing dealers to buy tickets worth Rs 5,000 each.He also questioned thew AMC's apparent hypocrisy in force-selling tickets on the one hand and sealing shops on the other.

Municipal Commissioner B K Sinha, while defending the decision to use staff members to sell tickets - because it was in connection with the Chief Minister's Relief Fund - denied that they had been instructed to force people to buy. Officers were directed to inform potential buyers of the tax benefits in buying the tickets.

At the police department, officials claim they had been given tickets to sell by the collector's office but no targets had been fixed. However, in a pointer to official hierarchy within the state, sources said the government was bullish on the police's performance as business houses and traders could not refuse policemen.

Sources also said that traders' associations had been told to deposit fixed amounts and collect the tickets - priced between Rs 100 and Rs 5,000 - from the police commissioner's office.

Ahmedabad collector V S Gadhvi has been on tour in thedistrict for the past two days but sources in the collectorate said the department was asked to sell one-third of the total 20,000 tickets for the show. Their task, the sources add, was made more difficult as their target area for sale of tickets fell outside city limits.

(With inputs from Tanvir Siddqui and Rajendra Sharma)