The Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) has over 3000 court cases including the district court and the Bombay High Court, which are yet to get resolved and the total amount that it has spent on fighting the legal battles in court in the last 15 years is pegged at Rs 3.44 crore.

Between January 2001 and November 2008, the PMC has 2707 court and appeal cases against it. This has been revealed in an answer to a query filed by corporator Avinash Jadhav.

PMC Legal adviser Bhagyashree Alate told The Indian Express , “The most number of notices that we issue are against building permissions, followed by the cases regarding land acquisition for civic projects and also against the tax defaulters.”

She added, “The PMC is bound to fight a legal battle, as the people, against whom we issue legal notices, challenge us and we are compelled to take the matter to the court. Ninety per cent of the cases are of this type.”

Alate said that the quantum of PMC’s pending cases is huge. “Due to the paucity of judges and rising proportion of cases being filed on a daily basis, the old cases remain pending for a long time in the court.”

On allegations that expenditure of the PMC legal department was on the rise, Alate said, "The cases with no substance not only waste everybody's time but also public money."

In his query, the corporator also sought to know the number of cases that the PMC has won in the last 15 years as also the number of cases that it has lost, to which the civic body has replied that the information is being collected.