Under the MIC, all financial and executive powers would be vested in the mayor and the municipal commissioner in turn plays a second fiddle to elected wing. This would obviously not be acceptable to any bureaucrat.

Interestingly, the State government had set up a committee to work out the modalities for introducing the system -- meetings and discussion have been going on for long -- last year itself.

According to BJP city president Pravin Naik, the reported failure of MIC in Mumbai had also forced the Gujarat government to shelve its proposal. ``The system in Mumbai -- a model for civic governance -- has failed to deliver the goods. And since the Maharashtra government is going to drop MIC there is no point replicating it in Gujarat,'' he claimed. Naik, however, still advocated for more powers to the mayor for effective functioning of the civic body.

Though the Bombay Provincial Municipal Corporation Act has been modified giving more powers to mayor and restricting the civic chief, the municipal commissioner still continues to rule the roost.

Advocating the MIC system, senior standing committee member Shankar Chavli said that under the present system, the first citizen was merely a ``rubber stamp.'' His job was only to cut ribbons and conduct general board meeting, he claimed, stressing for more financial powers to the mayor.

The government, Chavli said, instead of shelving the MIC, should modify it and evolve a ``system within the system'' to check misuse of power.

Even former mayor Ajit Desai was against the decision of shelving the MIC. According to him, though it would also not be wise on the part of the government to implement the Mumbai model as it is, the BJP should set up a study group to analyse why the system had failed in Mumbai, but proved effective in Calcutta. Decision based on one unsuccessful experiment would be simplistic, he added.

Desai, the All-India vice-president of MIC committee in 1992, was also for uniform system of governance in all civic bodies in the country. Mayor, he suggested, should be directly elected by the people for five years as in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu.

Naik, however, disagreed with Desai, saying that mayor should not be elected directly as the system had many pitfalls.

``In such a system even a criminal can be elected mayor'', Naik claimed, citing an example in Ahmedabad where a gangster got elected from six municipal wards.