On January 12, Mayor Nandu Satam had convened a meeting to discuss the road-widening, which was attended by Municipal Commissioner Girish Gokhale, Ward Officer Sahebrao Ghatge-Patil and the civic Roads Department staff. The issue of the galas, which have encroached on over half the road flanking the choc-a-bloc Western Express Highway, was discussed and it was finally decided that the project should proceed.

Exactly a month later, Ward Officer Ghatge-Patil was astounded when he received a copy of the minutes, which claimedthe shops had been built over 20 years ago. This would have entitled them to alternative accommodation if they had to be razed for the project. However, it was not the blatant lie that stunned him - it was the attribution of the statement to him!

Ghatge-Patil, who had initially wondered why the minutes had taken a month to reach Santacruz from the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation's headquarters, wrote to the municipal commissioner, clarifying that he had not mentioned the shops' age as over 20 years but had in fact stated at the meeting that they were built about four years ago. He also cited two attempts to demolish the galas as some of them are illegal. The mistake was finally rectified and the road-widening has since commenced.

Ghatge-Patil told Express Newsline that the minutes had definitely been doctored. He also said the road-widening had begun, albeit at snail's pace. ``The merchants have now agreed to shift their shops back by 10 ft,'' he said.

Local Congress Corporator A KBastiwala, however, revealed that this was not another faux pas that civic officials are so adept at. Calling it ``deliberate bungling'', he said: ``It was done intentionally to protect the marble merchants. About Rs 40 lakh changed hands at the top level in the administration as well as the Mayor-in-Council (MiC),'' Bastiwala told Express Newsline. In fact, sources in the ward office allege that the minutes had been changed at the behest of a senior MiC member.

Still smarting at the attempt to implicate him, Ghatge-Patil said he is determined to go ahead with the road-widening. ``I shall remove every obstacle and ensure that the people are not made to suffer unnecessarily.'' Also, Mayor Nandu Satam said he had specifically instructed the ward officer to proceed with the project. ``I issued these instructions just a couple of days ago. I have also asked to be apprised of the progress,'' he said.

Had the `typographical error' not been detected and the roadblock cleared, this would have beenone of the rare instances where public works have been hampered merely because senior civic officials had `agreed' to protect a handful of illegal shopkeepers.