In a bid to attain good rankings in Swachh Survekshan (clean survey)-2018, the Jaipur Municipal Corporation (JMC) got so engrossed in the upkeep of the city that they lost focus on revenue collection. In the current financial year, the municipal corporation has recovered only Rs 49 crore from the Urban Development (UD) Tax against Rs 250 crore fixed in the budget. Moreover, in the last one year the JMC hasn’t sold any land and that resulted in JMC making no money in the land sale.

Traditionally, most of JMC’s revenue comes from the earning from UD Tax, Hoarding Auction and Land Auction, but this year the city is lagging behind. The municipal corporation did not auction any land from April 2017 to March 2018. Similarly, with Hoarding Auction, only Rs 45 crore have been collected by JMC, and it is yet to recover Rs 49 crore UD tax.

The highest UD tax of Rs 65 crore was collected in FY15-16. The then JMC Commissioner Ashutosh AT Padnekar had during his tenure launched a special survey to collect UD tax and since he left, the collection is seeing a downward trend. A recovery of Rs 62 crore UD tax was made in the last financial year and this time it has come down to 49 crore.

In the budget of FY 2017-18, the target of recovering 250 crore of UD tax was fixed and so far JMC has made only 20 per cent tax collection.

Normally the tax payers deposits UD tax in the last quarter of the financial year. Moreover, to ensure smooth collection of tax, the state government has also given a discount on the penalty for the last three and four months and had also given exemption on the same. But, this time the entire staff of JMC was engaged in clean survey-2018 during the months of December to February and that took away their focus from collection of the UD Tax Collection.

CONSTANT FAILURE