Ludhiana: Because of the election of the Assembly, most of the sources of the generation of Civic’s body ran dry and officials found it difficult to recover contributions.
Because they could not take strict action against absent from the election season, officials had been told to only send reminders to those who had not paid property tax for the current year.
In addition, with staff trapped on electoral assignments, recovery has been jammed.
Officials said there were more than 1 lakh owner who had not paid property tax for this financial year, but they could not take action because they had time until March 31.
This year, MC must recover Rs 110 Crore in property taxes, but until now they can only produce RS 76 Crore.
A few days before the imposition of the code of ethics, Commissioner MC Pardeeep Sabharwal has requested officials to accelerate recovery and also serve sealing notifications in the previous year.
But it didn’t work.
One official said they had been told to restore contributions with advisors and did not become hard on people because of the assemblies.
He said MC had taken RS 100 crore loans and in cases there was no recovery of pending contributions, they would not be able to pay back.
“Exceptional water supply and sewerage contributions are released and even the current bill is only Rs 50 per household.
So the only hope is to get contributions from commercial and industrial units,” he added.
However, the sources said when officials were only worried about paying salaries to staff and more than RS 40 Crore Payment was postponed towards the contractor, which had executed various development work.
MC Inspector Vivek Verma said, “We try our best to restore delayed contributions, but most of the staff are in the assignment of elections.
Still, we have asked people to pay their taxes.”