Chennai Corporation unveils tax-free budget

Published on March 16,2010:

CHENNAI: Continuing the tradition of presenting a tax-free budget in the historic city Corporation, the DMK-led civic body on Monday unveiled its annual financial plan for 2010-11 at a special session held in Ripon Building here.

Though the civic body neither introduced new taxes nor revised existing ones, it was a deficit budget.
Unveiling budgetary allocations for different sectors, Chennai Corporation Taxation and Finance Committee chairman Radha Sambandam said the total revenue for the financial year is estimated to be Rs 1787.90 crore and the total expenditure is estimated to be 1789.03 crore with a deficit of Rs 1.13 crore.

While the civic body’s tax revenue for the fiscal is estimated to be around Rs 530 crore, the Corporation needs to cough up a whopping Rs 576 crore as establishment expenses (staff salaries) for the same period.

Under the capital expenditure for the 2010- 11 period, the civic body has earmarked Rs 250 crore for storm water drains, Rs 30 crore for bus route roads development, Rs 60 crore for bridges, Rs 70 crore for constructing buildings, Rs 5 crore for maintaining parks and gardens, Rs 5 crore for installing basic amenities at its schools and Rs one crore for healthcare initiatives.

In the 2009-10 period, the civic body took many special efforts to collect property tax arrears and its measures such as putting up billboards in front of defaulters had yielded good results. For this period (until March 31, 2010) the total collection is likely to be Rs 375 crore and this would be a 17.19 per cent jump over last year’s collection of Rs 320 crore.
Likewise, for the next fiscal (2010-11), property tax collection is expected to be about Rs 380 crore.