new delhi despite being a financially vibrant city delhis municipal bodies are constantly trying to fend off monetary crises the frequent strikes by sanitation workers and teachers over unpaid salaries last year even hospital staff suspended work in october for the same reason explicitly underlines the struggle to match the civic bodies income with their expenses there is now a line of thought that believes unifying the finance departments of the three municipal corporations could help tide over the constant cash crunchexplaining the roadmap along this line proposed by north delhi municipal corporation a civic official said the faulty trifurcation of the municipal corporation of delhi in 2012 left major revenue projects and high property tax wielding colonies to the south civic body while major hospitals and services requiring a lot of money for operations went to the north body the east corporation was unfortunate too to inherit the bulk of the citys slum clusters and unauthorised coloniesthe north mayor jai prakash announced on wednesday that the north corporations detailed proposal on a unified financial department would be sent to delhi government and lieutenant governor east corporation mayor nirmal jain welcomed this proposal saying a nodal officer can be appointed from each civic body to oversee clubbing of the finances this will benefit both employees and citizens south mayor anamika hadnt seen the proposal and said she would comment only after poring through the detailsjai prakash noted that unifying the finance and planning departments of the three municipalities would leave a surplus of rs 1317 crore even after paying salaries and pensions north corporations proposal argues that if unification of the three bodies was not possible at least their finances should be clubbed the combined expenditure on salaries and pensions of all three corporations is less than the internal revenue plus combined nonplan grants received by the three civic bodies the proposal states the calculations have been carried out on the basis of the 201920 financial yearrevenues of the three corporations totalled rs 6725 crore that year with sdmc accounting for 486 of this delhi governments nonplan grants took the income to rs 10257 crore north corporation had the largest salarypension bill of rs 4200 crore when its income was rs 2590 crore but the combined salary bill of the three corporations was just rs 8940 crore leaving a net balance of rs 1317 crorein january the confederation of mcd employees had petitioned the lg to reunify the corporations arguing that the root cause of financial crises was the arbitrary trifurcation of the single municipal corporationa corporation official told toi that at the time of trifurcation the then sheila dikshit government had assured financial handholding to help the subsidiary civic bodies to become selfreliant but the government changed soon after and the promised monetary help never arrived the official claimed