Nothing is more shocking than a municipal council which has lost track of commercial establishments in its jurisdiction. Margao has 6,760 trade and commercial establishments on its books, but the ground reality is quite different. Although there is no hard data to disprove the number provided by the MMC, there is enough circumstantial evidence to show that the city has not been properly mapped. The result is a lopsided budget and loss of revenue. In the previous year, the council earned a revenue of Rs 50.87 lakh by way of trade licence fee.
In the present year it hopes to raise Rs 2 crore. How did budget planners arrive at this figure? Does this mean the MMC has been losing revenue of Rs 1.5 crore every year, only because it is too lazy to create a database and walk that extra mile to collect taxes due to it? The Urban Development Minister was not wrong when he said that municipalities are poor tax collectors because they have easy access to State funds. This is the digital age and creation of a database is easier than it ever was in the past. Hence, this is a huge failure on the part of the MMC and the blame rests at the doorstep of the chairperson.
