Talking to Express Newsline on Wednesday, president of the Society for Clean Environment V V Modi said, ``For a city like Vadodara, once known for its best public hygiene system in Western India, occurrences such as the Alkapuri contamination cases are unacceptable. The VMC's laboratory and engineers could easily detect such contaminations in advance if they invite the advice of the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute, which has devised gadgets to check vulnerable spots from the outside.''

Former municipal commissioner S K Gangopadhyaya pointed out that the VMC neither had any maps denoting specific locations of the pipes laid nor accurate records of the dates when the public works were undertaken.

``Moreover, no plans have been formulated for conducting periodical checks on the situation underground. These are the greatest defects in the VMC's working methods,'' he said.

According to United Way Director Girdhar Vaswani, public works such as laying of sewage lines needed a circumspect planning at the conception level. ``As with most corporations, adequate attention to the sewage plan was not given at the inception stages, which is why the entire system has gone haywire,'' he said.

Stating that the VMC's budgetary allocations towards public hygiene and sanitation facilities were grossly inadequate, Modi stressed that measures to improve the same needed to be taken on a war footing. ``Can we forgive the corporation for having failed to restart the sewage treatment plants which have been lying unoperational for more than five years? They simply don't seem to have the administrative will,'' he stated.

While indeterminate about the various allocations in the civic body's budget, Gangopadhyaya said it was ``the collective responsibility of the citizens and the VMC to eliminate the inadequacies, if any''. ``But citizens have always been reluctant to pay more taxes,'' he added.

Vaswani explained it as the chicken-and-the-egg situation. ``People are willing to pay more taxes provided the VMC assures them good services in return. However, the VMC on its part cannot deliver the goods unless it has more money in hand. Some kind of understanding between the two needs to be reached,'' he said.

Modi suggested that a joint inquiry committee of experts from outside the corporation be set up to look into the issue ``not only with an aim of fault finding but to suggest steps to tap the problem at its source''. Stating that the problem was ``complex,'' Vaswani said execution of new plans will require a huge investment and may also inconvenience the public at some stage.