Come June and you be ready to encounter ‘special camps’ in your ward for collection of taxes – holding and otherwise and imposition of service charges.
Ranchi Municipal Corporation in a bid to improve its income from holding taxes and other service charges has decided to run ward wise camps from June 2013. A decision to this effect was taken in the RMC board meeting held on Monday, April 22.
The proposal passed in the board meeting on the matter read, “The holding taxes and service charges on the assets of RMC are the main sources of income for us. Therefore it is necessary to make efforts to increase income from these resources. Imposing public service taxes and conducting micro level surveys are few steps in that direction. …….for collecting taxes and imposing public service charges the RMC is running seven to eight camps. From June 2013 similar camps would be run in every ward.”
RMC Deputy Mayor Sanjiv Vijayvargiya said on Friday that a meeting would be convened on May 28 to decide the procedures and the modus operandi of the camps. “We will run such camps for three or four days in each ward. Each ward will have such camps on different dates,” he said.
Collecting taxes and imposing service charges on people have always been a ‘headache’ for RMC. There were two reason cited by the civic body representatives for the same.
First, is the fact that the civic body is “acutely short-staffed” with only 36 tax collectors to look after 55 wards. This implies every tax collector has to deal with around 4,000 houses. Also the civic body has only one zonal supervisor to look after the two zones (city is divided into two tax collection zones). The only supervisor is due to retire in June.
And the second reason is the “non-cooperation of people”. “With people of city being as non-cooperative as they are” it becomes difficult for RMC to pursue taxes. The desperate-for-revenue RMC has taken several steps in this year itself to increasing the volume of income from tax.
In February this year, the Ranchi Municipal Corporation introduced a dedicated van for collection of holding tax. The van was equipped with a Wll number 2100164. It was to move door to door on telephonic request for collecting taxes. The van seems to have gone off the road and is rarely seen.
In another move the RMC is also mulling to outsource the responsibility of collecting holding taxes to private organisation so that it could counter the staff crunch situation. The report was carried in this newspaper on April 23, 2013.
But will the desperation of the RMC for tax collection end with this idea of organising tax collection campsIJ This is something that only time will tell.