AMC to collect 'User Charges' from new financial year

Lokmat News Network

Aurangabad, Dec 6:

In a sudden development, the Aurangabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) has decided to collect ' User Charges' from the residential and commercial properties from April 1, 2022 (new financial year). The civic body manages to collect between Rs 130 crore and Rs 140 crore in the form of property tax, every year. Now, it would get additional revenue of Rs 40 crore as User Charges per annum from next year onwards.

The AMC has not revised property tax in the city for the past many years. The proposal was set aside during the first and second waves of Covid-19. The AMC administration has decided to levy 'User Charges' against the door to door collection of garbage and its processing in 2015. Later on, the AMC general body (GB) meeting passed it on February 21, 2019. The GB approved proposal was to collect Rs 100 annually from residential and Rs 500 from each non-residential and commercial property. The AMC floated a tender to appoint an NGO to collect the User Charges, but there was no response to it. As a result, the collection of charges was not initiated as per Solid waste Management (SWM) Rules (2016). In the meantime, the civic administration revised the User Charges to Rs 365 and Rs 730 for each residential and non-residential and commercial property.

Now, the AMC administrator has decided to collect it from April 1. The charges will be mentioned in the demand notice of tax. However, the shocking development is that the administration has not considered the User Charges approved by the GB, but the administrator has considered the charges revised by the administration in past (as mentioned above).