According to sources in the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation, a target of Rs 70 lakh has been set for the AMC, police department and the district collectorate, which includes the district panchayat. The diktat means these officials must use coercion, itself an unpleasant task, or sell on the promise of returning the favour later.

Not surprisingly, then, several senior officers as well as field officers in the AMC have proceeded on casual leave to spare themselves the task of selling the tickets.

The job must go on though, so in a rare display of organisation the corporation has set targets to individual departments. Sources said the TownPlanning Department was given 30 per cent of the tickets, the Engineering Department 25 per cent, Health and Octroi 10 per cent each, Property Tax five per cent and the rest distributed among the other departments.

It doesn't stop there; health inspectors have reportedly been asked to contact licenced shops and restaurants existing in the city, while octroi officials are contacting big-time dealers. The central office, which invites and allots tenders, has been asked to contact contractors.

It hasn't been easy going; one officer said he was finding it difficult to push the tickets through to the dealers and those who had bought tickets had done so only because he was an AMC official.

The murmurs of protest among ticket buyers were first raised on Tuesday when Prakash Rochwani, a member of the Ahmedabad Sweet and Milk Dealers' Association, alleged that corporation officials were forcing dealers to buy tickets worth Rs 5,000 each. He also questioned thew AMC's apparent hypocrisy in force-selling ticketson the one hand and sealing shops on the other. Municipal Commissioner B K Sinha, while defending the decision to use staff members to sell tickets - because it was in connection with the Chief Minister's Relief Fund - denied that they had been instructed to force people to buy. Officers were directed to inform potential buyers of the tax benefits in buying the tickets.

At the police department, officials claim they had been given tickets to sell by the collector's office but no targets had been fixed. However, in a pointer to official hierarchy within the state, sources said the government was bullish on the police's performance as business houses and traders could not refuse policemen.

(Inputs from Tanvir Siddqui and Rajendra Sharma)