Under pressure from ruling BJP, PCMC administration stays property tax hike

Dhore said the BJP delegation tried to impress upon the civic chief the need to postpone the hike in view of the Covid pandemic

The administration of the Pimpri-Chinchwad Municipal Corporation has decided not to implement the hike on property tax from April 1 (File)

Under pressure from the ruling BJP ahead of the 2022 civic elections, the administration of the Pimpri-Chinchwad Municipal Corporation has decided not to implement the hike on property tax from April 1.

The decision came after a delegation of the BJP met Municipal Commissioner Rajesh Patil on Wednesday. The delegation included Mayor Usha Dhore, BJP House leader Namdeo Dhake and standing committee chairman Nitin Landge. “Following the meeting, the muncipal commissioner passed an order putting a stay on implementation of the hike on old properties,” Deputy Municipal Commissioner Smita Zagade told The Indian Express this morning. “The hike in property tax will not be implemented from today,” she added.

Dhore said the BJP delegation tried to impress upon the civic chief the need to postpone the hike in view of the Covid pandemic. “Covid has hit the economy and citizens hard. Many local residents have lost their jobs and some had to take big salary cuts. In view of this, we told the municipal commissioner not to hike property tax,” the mayor said.
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“We also told the administration that in an election year, the hike is not justified,” she said.

Dhake said, “We have been opposing the move…we had rejected the proposal in the standing committee meeting and even the civic general body meeting”, adding that the party had decided to approach the state government to scrap the hike in case the civic administration refused to listen. NCP and Shiv Sena, the opposition parties in PCMC, had also opposed the hike.

The property tax was hiked by Patil’s predecessor Shravan Hardikar over two months ago. The administration had then said the civic general body’s permission for the hike was not needed as it could be done with the special powers vested with the municipal commissioner.

The civic administration had increased property tax on 2.5 lakh old residential properties and over 3 lakh non-residential properties. Zagade said the tax on old properties was hiked as there was a major difference between per square feet rate and subsequent property tax calculated on old and new properties. She said the hike on new properties was nominal.

Manoj Dattatrye More

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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