E-Paper
Chandigarh administration still owes MC ₹48 crore in property tax
Even MC’s own departments–horticulture and road wings—owe it more than ₹3 crore in unpaid property tax
Even after repeated property notices, threats of disconnection of water connections and latest rounds of meetings on unpaid dues with the municipal corporation officials, the UT administration has failed to pay more than ₹48 crore in outstanding property tax.
The UT Secretariat in Sector 9 (₹2.16 crore), Haryana Raj Bhawan (₹3.18 lakh), Punjab Raj Bhawan (₹2.7 lakh), Government College for Girls, Sector 11 (₹82 lakh), Art Gallery, Sector 10 (₹34 lakh), are among the top tax defaulters.
But the administration’s departments are not the only government agencies with unpaid property tax dues in their names. Even MC’s own departments–horticulture and road wings—owe it more than ₹3 crore in unpaid property tax.
In contrast to MC failing to make much headway in recovering property tax dues from the government departments, it has already recovered ₹49 crore from the residential, commercial and institutional segments against the initial tax collection target of ₹48 crore for the financial year 2020-2021. It has now revised the target to ₹54 crore.
For the cash-strapped MC, property tax is one of the two major sources of its revenues, the other being the collections from charges on water supply. There are 1.4 lakh properties under the jurisdiction of the MC, of which more than 1.2 lakh are taxable.
UT tops list of defaulters
The MC had served the administration property recovery notices for ₹10 crore in August, and another set of notices amounting to ₹44 crore with December 15 as the deadline for payment.
The notices were issued mainly to different wings of the UT engineering department, which maintains all the UT’s buildings. “Two wings cleared off ₹6 crore dues by submitting the receipts which showed they had already paid the tax. One of the wings, CP-3, has neither paid the dues nor submitted any receipts,” said an MC official, requesting anonymity.
The MC had also issued notices to its own departments; the dues stood at around ₹11 crore at the time of issuing the notices.
“Different MC departments reconciled around ₹8 crore in property tax, but ₹3 crore are still pending. We are pursuing the matter with the departments and hope these will be cleared soon,” said the official. The defaulting departments include roads and public health wings of the MC engineering department.
“While some departments have not paid the tax, in other cases, there is a mismatch between their records and ours. In such cases if they submit the receipt of the tax payments then we are accommodating them,” the official said.
