The Nandlal Committee, inquiring into the corruption and malfunctioning of the Thane Municipal Corporation, considered itself more a fact-finding committee. Its 230-page report is replete with details of various cases where corporators and TMC officials let down the people; recommendations are few by comparison. Still, these could become the touchstones of what to set right and how to go about it, if the administration is serious about thetask.

Not surprisingly, the Nandlal Committee recognises that officials and corporators have made the system corrupt and caused its decay. The recommendations attempt to set right the lop-sided equations between corporators and officials. Equally, they also attempt to introduce checks-and-balances in the official hierarchy so that no one officer, however senior his rank, has unlimited powers and authority.

Addressing the kickback system evolved by the corporator-contractor nexus, the report suggests that the TMC should constitute a Tenders (or Proposals) Committee comprising city engineer, deputy civic secretary and related executive engineers. This Committee should prepare a list of contractors for each project and present it simultaneously to the municipal commissioner and the Standing Committee.

Other key recommendations: city engineer should not have powers to sanction unlimited time-overruns, his powers should be limited to giving 50 per cent additional time for the project, any delays andtime-overruns after that should be approved only by the municipal commissioner. The Committee is clear that the TMC administration should be more alert and pro-active about unauthorised construction.

Also important is the suggestion that demolition teams must be given police protection -- not only in TMC but all municipal corporations and councils in the state and the owner of an unauthorised structure need not be given one month's notice for demolition. ``Experience is that this one month is used to obtain stay orders against demolition....the time period should be seven days,'' states the report.

On the subject of appointments and promotions, the Committee suggests that the TMC should cancel all appointments made in violation of rules so far; also, the administration should prepare Employment Rules and obtain the state government's approval. On the subject of octroi, the Committee established that corrupt and careless officials were responsible for the TMC's dwindling octroi collection in the last twoyears; also that the steps taken by municipal commissioner T Chandrashekhar had arrested the fall and streamlined collection.

The onus of mopping up the mess is largely on TMC administration and, to some extent, on state government. Between the lines, the report argues for a no-nonsense and upright commissioner able to plug the holes created over the last many years -- exactly the kind of a man the corporators and a section of the officials hate to see.