Faced with severe financial crisis and the inability to disburse salaries to their employees, the north and south Delhi Municipal Corporation could struggle to pay the salaries in accordance with the Seventh Pay Commission.
While the North Corporation is struggling to pay its employees currently, South is in a comparatively better off state. They have however announced an adoption of recommendations of Seventh Pay Commission and both hardly have any plans in place to increase their scope of revenue generation.
A look into each of three corporations individually shows that North Corporation’s salary expenditure is `2, 640 crore as against its internal revenue which is only `2,375 crore, leaving a gap of `265 crore. The internal revenue of three corporations is `5,975 crore. The combined salary expenditure is nearly `6,240 crore, which includes salary of employees, arrears and medical allowances.
The condition of South corporation is marginally better as the civic body has estimated earnings of `2,755 crore and salary expenditure of `2640 crore. Moreover, there is an extra burden of `2, 000 crore with the implementation of Seventh Pay Commission recommendations.
During the presentation of proposed Budget,
estimates by leader of the House Yogender Chandolia, it was announced that recommendations of Seventh Pay Commission will be adopted as announced. In South Corporation too, leader of the House Ashish Sood too announced the adoption of the Seventh Pay Commission recommendations. However, officials within the corporations say that the corporation needs to increase its scope of revenue generation in a bid to be able to disburse the salaries when Seventh Pay Commission comes in place.
“The Corpo-ration plans to come up with commercial sites at Azadpur, Model Town, Dhaka and Minto Road which will be developed
by the National Building Construction Corporation. The sites will be leased/rent out for commercial/office/residential activities which likely to fetch several crore. Other than that, we have identified more properties which are to pay house taxes.
This will again fetch more revenue,” he added.
However, leader of Opposition Mukesh Goel said, “Their idea of income generation is flawed. They have no proper strategies to be able to disburse the hiked salaries. North Corporation is unable to give a pension which is a meager amount of `1,000. They have no idea how to generate revenue and keep with the salaries that will be increase once the Pay Commission is executed. During the budget, there were no announcements regarding revenue generation or ways in which corporation can do better monetarily.”