Piling up garbage, lack of maintenance of roads and street lights - it's the same old story in Salt Lake. The imbroglio over realisation of property tax from residents has put the municipality in a soup. The municipality has no funds to run the daily amenities.
Nearly eight months after the Supreme Court scrapped the property tax structure and asked Bidhannagar Municipality to stop tax collection, the matter is still pending before the court.
The municipality had planned to upgrade civic amenities with the fund. However, the plan hit a roadblock after the apex court's verdict. According to the civic body's estimates, it could have earned Rs 10 crore to Rs 12 crore this year from property taxes only. The municipality is already running losses of about Rs 7 crore since tax collection stopped. "Had we been able to collect taxes in the last seven months, we could have earned nearly Rs 6 crore to 7 crore more," said municipality's finance officer Somnath Mukherjee. According to records, the civic body had earned nearly Rs 10 crore from tax and other revenue collections in 2005 and nearly the same amount in 2006.
However, Mukherjee said their plea to get Rs 5 crore fund to make up the loss of not being able to collect taxes has gone to the finance department. "The money is likely to be sanctioned soon," he said.
The municipality spends about Rs 75 lakh per month for maintaining basic civic services, which means it has already spent Rs 5.25 crore from June last year. Besides, it has to pay Rs 1 crore to KMC every year for getting water from Tallah. The civic body spends around Rs 20 lakh on salaries, Rs 30 lakh on streetlight bills, Rs 10 lakh for maintaining the water reservoirs and pumping stations and about Rs 10 lakh for solid waste disposal.
The civic body had also lined up several projects to develop civic amenities, using the tax money. It had allocated Rs 7 crore for road repair that was supposed to be completed by 2007. For water supply, it had allocated Rs 5 crore. The civic body had also allocated Rs 5 crore for parks, Rs 3 crore for markets and Rs 3 crore for drainage and streetlights. All these projects are slated to be completed by 2009.
Source: Times Of India
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2 comments:
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How can one expect Facilities like good roads and a clean city without paying taxes. Incidentally, our tax rates are much less than any of the other Metros.
As regards the complaints regarding unfair Tax structure, a committee had been constituted to examine such cases and aggrieved persons were given a fair hearing to resolve discrepancies/ problems.
We must not avoid paying our taxes
if we want Service.
B.Neogy
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