After South and East, the North Delhi Municipal Corporation has also quashed proposals to increase property taxes in its revised budget for 2019-2020 released Wednesday.
All three corporations had earlier proposed a marginal increase in the property taxes, which were opposed by their political units. A senior official of the East civic body said, “This has been happening year after year — the commissioner proposes a tax increase and the political wing quashes it.”
This comes even as the North and East MCDs have a budget deficit of Rs 1,300 crore and Rs 1,700 crore respectively, and are dependent upon loans to pay salaries. While the North body had proposed a 1% increase in property tax under the A to E categories and a 2% increase in the F to H categories, the East body had proposed an education cess of 5% and a betterment tax, which would account for 15% of the property tax.
“The MCDs earned Rs 1,558 crore from property tax last year (North Rs 591 crore; South Rs 697 crore; East Rs 270 crore) as compared to Mumbai’s BMC which earned over Rs 4,950 crore… While the BMC revised tax rates in 2015, Delhi MCDs have not increased property tax since 2011 — that too was a marginal increase of 1%,” said an official.
A senior official of the North MCD said, “There are two ways to increase corporation revenue through property tax. One is to increase the tax payers’ net, but that has not produced much result as all such proposals to increase revenue are based on bringing amnesty schemes. This is a bad trend because people who pay their taxes on time feel cheated.”
Former municipal commissioner Rakesh Mehta said rather than giving amnesty schemes, the corporation should improve vigilance: “We don’t have complete data of all households. Notices should be issued to those who don’t pay taxes… and it should be followed up legally.”
