The Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation is preparing to award an estimated Rs 5 crore contract for 180 outsourced peons to three agencies without inviting a fresh tender, according to a report by Gujarat Samachar – Ahmedabad. The proposal is scheduled to be placed before the civic body’s Standing Committee for consideration on Wednesday, October 21, 2026.
Under the proposal, the services of 180 peons, or office support staff, would be hired for one year through Ultramodern, Clean India and Shashwat Safalya Private Limited. Each agency would be assigned 60 workers. The proposal also includes provisions to exempt the agencies from submitting a formal agreement and depositing a security amount.
The civic administration is citing a shortage of peons in several departments despite the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation having more than 15,000 employees. The proposed arrangement would distribute the outsourced staff across departments, with nine workers from each agency assigned to the secretary’s office and the remaining 51 deployed in other departments.
The agencies would receive work orders from the relevant municipal departments, which would also be responsible for making payments linked to the workers’ services and salaries. The proposal is based on an earlier resolution approved by the Health and Solid Waste Management Committee on August 22, 2025.
That earlier resolution had approved two separate outsourcing proposals: one involving 164 peons at a cost of Rs 6.13 crore for two years, and another involving 288 peons at a cost of Rs 16 crore for two years. Based on those figures, the annual cost per worker is estimated at around Rs 2.77 lakh, or approximately Rs 23,150 per month.
The proposed spending has also raised questions about how much of this amount reaches the workers as wages. The report states that outsourced peons are generally believed to receive monthly salaries of between Rs 12,000 and Rs 15,000. It also refers to allegations that the remaining amount is retained by the agencies. These claims have not been independently established in the supplied report.
The arrangement places procurement procedure and labour-payment oversight at the centre of the proposal. A tender-free award would mean that the civic body relies on the earlier resolution and the previously named agencies instead of conducting a new competitive selection process for the 180 positions. The proposal also seeks exemptions from two standard contractual safeguards: execution of an agreement and submission of a deposit.
The matter is not yet a final contract award. The Standing Committee must decide whether to approve the proposal. If cleared, the three agencies would each be expected to provide 60 peons for deployment across the corporation’s offices and departments for the next year.
