BMC to regularise illegal use of building spaces

With its finances under pressure, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) on Tuesday kept taxes unchanged, but sought to raise revenue by regularising illegal use of spaces inside buildings, hiking certain fees like trade licences and birth certificates, and ramping up its effort to recover pending property tax bills. The Rs 33,441-crore civic budget for 2020-21, an increase of around Rs 3,000 crore from last year, was tabled by municipal commissioner Praveen Pardeshi in the civic standing committee meeting on Tuesday. No new mega projects were announced, but existing ones like the coastal road and Goregaon-Mulund Link Road received generous funds. The BMC proposed to raise Rs 600 crore by regularising unauthorised use of flower beds, lofts and car decks by building occupants by charging a premium. It also hopes to collect Rs 6,768 crore as property tax, including at least 10% of the outstanding Rs 15,000 crore, in the next financial year. This is bound to be an uphill task because between April 2019 and January 2020, it managed to collect just Rs 2,878 crore as property tax.