The municipal administration today completed a fortnight-long exercise involving inspections of hotels to pinpoint large-scale unauthorised structures and issue of notices on the spot. The fresh list includes about 150 hotels, a majority of them run by politicians including sitting and former Members of Legislative Assembly (MLAs) and corporators.

Confirming this, Municipal Commissioner Rajiv Agarwal told media persons that the fresh list was ready with city engineer Madhav Harihar. The building inspectors at the city engineer's office were entrusted with the job of gathering specific details of the unauthorised structures at each of the hotels. Besides listing the unauthorised constructions, fresh notices were also issued to the erring hoteliers. Criminal proceedings were also being initiated against some of them.

The names of the hotels on the fresh list was not released to the media. But official sources confirmed that a majority of the hotels from the old list of 114 were retained in the fresh list.

It may be recalled here that the city engineer's office had prepared a list way back in 1995. But the administration had failed to take any action except for withholding the permits from the health department to such hotels.

The elected representatives had cornered the municipal administration when the list of hotels was published by The Indian Express last year. It was argued by them that the old list needed to be updated to confirm the status of the unauthorised structures before any action was initiated against the hoteliers.

The elected representatives, who now appear to have got a hint of the administration's ``preparedness'' to counter their queries on the raging issue during the forthcoming general body meeting, put up a brave face. They reiterated their plan of cornering the administration for its inaction in case of unauthorised constructions by ``big sharks'' including those in the construction and hotel business.

It may be mentioned here that as many as 16 queries have been raised by corporators on this issue. Only a couple of days ago Congressmen had urged the civic chief to undertake a inspection drive on a war-footing during the next 15 days to clear the doubts likely to have cropped up in the minds of the citizens about the municipal administration's competence to deal with the large-scale violations of civic rules by the big hotels.

The elected representatives had taken lead to expose a few cases but the administration was in the know of several such cases and should expose the culprits. This was necessary since the recent initiative taken by the corporators in this regard was being misinterpreted by ``vested interests'' to paint a wrong picture leading to doubts being raised about the intentions behind their crusade.

The memorandum was signed by former mayor Ankush Kakade, former deputy mayor Ramesh Khanna, former PMT chairman Ajit Apte, standing committee members Nitin Jagtap and Vijay Mohite, corporators Ajit Darekar and Rajlaxmi Bhosle.