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This is an archive article published on August 14, 2022

Members of transgender community to help PCMC collect taxes from residents

The decision to allot the work of tax collection to members of the transgender community was taken at a standing committee meeting presided by Municipal Commissioner and administrator Rajesh Patil on Friday.

Pimpri-Chinchwad Municipal Corporation (PCMC) has decided to appoint members of the transgender community to help the civic body collect taxes from citizens. (File)
Pimpri-Chinchwad Municipal Corporation (PCMC) has decided to appoint members of the transgender community to help the civic body collect taxes from citizens. (File)

The Pimpri-Chinchwad Municipal Corporation (PCMC) has decided to appoint members of the transgender community to help the civic body collect taxes from citizens. The move is aimed at bringing the transgender community into the mainstream of public life and help them live their lives with pride, dignity and self-respect. “We have taken the revolutionary step of appointing transgenders to collect property tax from citizens. I think this is a first-of-its-kind move taken by any civic body in Maharashtra,” PCMC Assistant Municipal Commissioner Nilesh Deshmukh told The Indian Express on Saturday.

The decision to allot the work of tax collection to members of the transgender community was taken at a standing committee meeting presided by Municipal Commissioner and administrator Rajesh Patil on Friday.

The PCMC has earlier appointed members of the transgender community as security guards, on green marshal squad and as members of the River Protection Force. They have also been appointed in civic gardens.The PCMC has also made a provision of ensuring pension for them.

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PCMC has a bachat gat or self-help group of transgenders. “From the self-help group, we have picked a few people and formed a Shalaka Pathak or Shalaka Squad. Two such squads will be operational from August 15. The squads will be given incentives for achieving the set target,” he said.

Deshmukh said members of the transgender community will be appointed for a period of three months. “Depending on their performance, we will decide on giving them extensions,” he said.

Pimpri-Chinchwad has 5.77 lakh property owners and in the last four months, the civic body has collected Rs 400 crore in taxes.

Manoj More has been working with the Indian Express since 1992. For the first 16 years, he worked on the desk, edited stories, made pages, wrote special stories and handled The Indian Express edition. In 31 years of his career, he has regularly written stories on a range of topics, primarily on civic issues like state of roads, choked drains, garbage problems, inadequate transport facilities and the like. He has also written aggressively on local gondaism. He has primarily written civic stories from Pimpri-Chinchwad, Khadki, Maval and some parts of Pune. He has also covered stories from Kolhapur, Satara, Solapur, Sangli, Ahmednagar and Latur. He has had maximum impact stories from Pimpri-Chinchwad industrial city which he has covered extensively for the last three decades.   Manoj More has written over 20,000 stories. 10,000 of which are byline stories. Most of the stories pertain to civic issues and political ones. The biggest achievement of his career is getting a nearly two kilometre road done on Pune-Mumbai highway in Khadki in 2006. He wrote stories on the state of roads since 1997. In 10 years, nearly 200 two-wheeler riders had died in accidents due to the pathetic state of the road. The local cantonment board could not get the road redone as it lacked funds. The then PMC commissioner Pravin Pardeshi took the initiative, went out of his way and made the Khadki road by spending Rs 23 crore from JNNURM Funds. In the next 10 years after the road was made by the PMC, less than 10 citizens had died, effectively saving more than 100 lives. Manoj More's campaign against tree cutting on Pune-Mumbai highway in 1999 and Pune-Nashik highway in 2004 saved 2000 trees. During Covid, over 50 doctors were  asked to pay Rs 30 lakh each for getting a job with PCMC. The PCMC administration alerted Manoj More who did a story on the subject, asking then corporators how much money they demanded....The story worked as doctors got the job without paying a single paisa. Manoj More has also covered the "Latur drought" situation in 2015 when a "Latur water train" created quite a buzz in Maharashtra. He also covered the Malin tragedy where over 150 villagers had died.     Manoj More is on Facebook with 4.9k followers (Manoj More), on twitter manojmore91982 ... Read More


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