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BMC gets tough on holding tax

BHUBANESWAR: With State Government departments shying away from paying holding taxes to Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation (BMC), Chief Secretary Ajit Kumar Tripathy cracked a whip directing defaulting departments to pay the outstanding or face coercive measures.

A letter from Chief Secretary’s office to concerned departments said, “BMC which is looking after management of capital city need to improve financial health considerably so that it will be able to take up more developmental work also discharge its regulatory function effectively.”

Non-payment of holding tax was creating obstacle on the way of BMC to perform its duty. Mr. Tripathy said in a strongly worded circular.

“I request all departments to pay the outstanding or I will be forced to authorise BMC to take coercive measures against government departments, agencies and public sector units,” he said in the letter.

According to BMC sources, some Rs.7 crore of outstanding on holding tax was pending against several government departments.

Utkal University turned out to be the biggest defaulter as the premiere university had to pay Rs. 52.93 lakhs towards the holding tax.

The State Government’s tallest official building Rajiv Bhawan was to pay Rs. 15.97 lakhs of outstanding. Orissa State Road Transport Corporation, Grid Corporation of Orissa Limited and Orissa Computer Application Centre would have to pay Rs. 10.43 lakhs, Rs. 10.07 lakhs and Rs. 4.43 lakhs respectively.

Similarly, Special Circuit House managed by Additional District Magistrate of Khurda had Rs. 1.27 lakhs outstanding pending against its name.

Moreover, sub-collector of Khurda had to pay Rs. 14, 414 holding tax.

The defaulters’ list had many names including Capital Hospital, Information and Public Relation Department and Central Electricity Supply Company (now CESU).

Earlier, the BMC had made several correspondences with the government departments to recover its due but all its persuasions had gone in vain.

The corporation was not only struggling to get back its due on account of holding tax from governments, there were many private educational institutes those figured in defaulters list. Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology (KIIT) University was to pay over Rs. 3 crore towards holding tax to BMC but the matter is now subjudice.

Earlier, the corporation had released a list of 22 top educational institutes who had not paid the holding tax in newspapers.

Subsequently, it published individual defaulters’ list to publicly offend them for not paying the tax.

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