TREBLING WATER charges, increasing property tax by 18 per cent, doubling garbage collection charge and introducing environment cess on commercial properties to fund public transport services were among the key policy proposals in the draft budget for the year 2023-’24 of the Rajkot Municipal Corporation (RMC) presented Tuesday. Municipal Commissioner Amit Arora presented a Rs 2,586 crore budget to Pushkar Patel, chairman of the standing committee of the RMC, on Tuesday morning. The budget focused mainly on improving water supply, roads and drainage system by allocating Rs 912 crore to these sectors for the next fiscal. This represents 57 per cent of the total Rs 1,599 crore budgeted capital expenditure for the year 2023-’24. Arora proposed to increase the carpet area tax rate from Rs11 per square metre (sqm) to Rs13 per sqm for residential properties and from Rs 22 per sqm to Rs 25 sqm for commercial properties. The municipal commissioner’s budget speech underlined that the tax increase was proposed to cover RMC’s revenue expenditure which is projected to balloon to Rs 908 crore in 2023-’24 from Rs 585 in 2018-’19. Arora proposed to increase the annual water charges from the existing Rs 840 to Rs 2,400 for residential premises and from Rs1,860 to Rs 4,800 for commercial premises while explaining that the increase rate will translate into a monthly water bill of Rs 200 and Rs 400 for residential and commercial establishments respectively . The commissioner also proposed to double the annual garbage collection charge from Rs 365 (at the rate of Rs1 per day) to Rs 730. In another proposal which can increase property tax liability of old premises, the municipal commissioner proposed to subsume five age categories of properties into two. Instead of the existing categories of properties of less than 10, 20, 30,40 years old and more than 40 years old and having property factors of 1.2, 0.80, 0.50, 0.25 and 0.25 respectively, the commissioner proposed to classify properties as less than 30 year old and more than 30 year old and have the factors of one and 0.50 respectively. The budget also proposed to levy environment cess on non-residential properties. The applicable cess will be 13 per cent of the general tax of non-residential properties having carpet area larger than 50 sqm. Addressing a press conference after presenting the budget to the standing committee, Arora said that while the property tax collection is on the rise, it has to rise faster to keep pace with the revenue expenditure. “Property tax rate has not been raised in Rajkot since the carpet-area-based system was introduced in 2018-19. The existing rates are fairly low if we were to consider rates in the range of 16 to Rs 30 per square metre in cities like Ahmedabad, Vadodara etc,” Arora said. The municipal commissioner also said that the RMC owes water dues worth more than Rs1,000 crore to various government entities and cost recovery at the annual charge of Rs 840 is merely 27 per cent. “To provide quality water, we need to bring down the percentage of non-revenue water and also improve cost recovery by increasing water charges," Arora said, adding water charges have not been increased since 2008. He also said that an environment cess was needed to cross-fund city bus service the RMC offers.
