By IANS,
New Delhi : Delhi Mayor Kanwar Sain Thursday slammed the municipal budget estimates presented a day earlier which proposed hikes in existing tax and new tax schemes. He said the proposal would not be implemented bearing in mind the welfare of Delhi residents.
“The budget presented yesterday (Wednesday) was the proposal of the Municipal Commissioner (K.S. Mehra) and not the views of the governing body. This proposal will now be scrutinised… We will not let the proposed hikes in existing taxes like property tax or the new professional tax to be implemented,” Sain told IANS.
Mehra on Wednesday proposed to introduce a new set of taxes like the professional tax on those with an income above Rs.30,000 and the betterment tax on those who were residing in areas with better civic amenities like Metro Rail services. Hikes in the existing property and commercial tax rates were also proposed in the MCD budget estimates 2010-11.
The mayor clarified that tax payers would not be made to “feel the added burden from unnecessary taxes” at a time when prices of essential goods and services in the national capital were already rocketing.
“From the over 16 million residents of Delhi only 900,000 are paying property tax. So by hiking this tax why would we (MCD) penalise those who are already paying. Those who aren’t shelling out their dues need to be brought under the scanner and we will take legal and policy level action against them,” Sain added.
He further said that the new taxes that Mehra had proposed “were out of the question”.
The commissioner’s budget was “merely a proposal”, Sain said, which would now be discussed and amended in the standing committee meetings in January next year.
“A final call on the MCD budget will be taken only in February and most of the councillors and administrative heads are not in favour of such skewed policy decisions,” a senior MCD official told IANS on condition of anonymity.
In last year’s budget, the MCD had hoped to collect Rs.526 crore (Rs.5.26 billion) from various sources but MCD officials said that the plan didn’t quite work out.
Interestingly, similar schemes have been proposed again this year by the civic body for earning revenue.
While MCD’s annual income in the present budget is pegged at Rs.6,346 crore (Rs.63.46 billion), the additional earnings hoped for is Rs.500 crore (Rs.5 billion).