Bhubaneswar, March 3: Hoardings are being put to a unique use here - force defaulters to pay their taxes.
The Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation (BMC) today put up four hoardings at different places in the city to name and shame 90 tax defaulters.
The BMC will come out with another set of eight hoardings with the names of all the 238 defaulters, who owe the corporation Rs 4.46 crore.
The civic authorities have already uploaded a list of these defaulters on their official website. The PDF version of the list can also be downloaded from the municipal corporation's website.
Sources said since morning the staff of the civic body were scouting for prominent locations and finally zeroed in on Kalpana Square, Rajmahal Square link road, Satyanagar Kali temple, Jaydev Vihar Square and Ashok Nagar (opposite UCO bank). The other hoardings will be put up within a day or two.
"The publication of the defaulters' list on hoardings is to make the individuals aware about the gravity of the situation. We hope by the end of the month most of them will pay their dues," said deputy commissioner of the municipal corporation Subhranshu Sekhar Mishra, who is in charge of the tax wing of the civic body.
The corporation body has adopted stringent measures as the holding tax collection is gradually going down.
While the civic body has set a target of Rs 30 crore from holding tax alone for the year 2014-15, it has so far managed to collect only Rs 12 crore.
"We are hoping to bridge the gap by the end of this month and to achieve that we adopted such measures. We are also going to take the help of drummers who will play drums in front of the houses of the defaulters to demand the dues from them," said Mishra.
Chairman of BMC standing committee on finance and taxation Seikh Nizammudin said: "In future, more private agencies will be engaged to collect users' fees and other charges from people. However, efforts should be made to implement property tax as it can help the civic body receive around Rs 100 crore a year."
Municipal commissioner Krishan Kumar said: "After April 1, we are going to deal strictly with all defaulters under the Odisha Public Demands Recovery (OPDR) Act, 1962. It can lead to attachment of movable assets, immovable assets and then seizure of houses and freezing of accounts if the person concerned fails to provide replies to the queries by the certificate officer who slaps the OPDR notice for not paying the holding tax."
Since no BMC official enjoys the power to register complaints against a defaulter under the OPDR Act, a special certificate officer in the sub-collector's office will be asked to implement the Act to nab the holding tax defaulter.
For the first time, the civic authorities are going to collect users' fee for disposal of solid waste from houses. This has been done to boost the tax coffers for city's development.
Bijay Mishra, a resident of Nayapalli, said: "The initiative of displaying the names of the defaulters on hoardings is good, but the authorities should have used a bigger font to attract maximum attention."
Faculty member of a city-based technical institute Sujata Rath said: "Bhubaneswar was planned in a beautiful way, but subsequently its development has become messy. To bring it at par with modern cities, there is a need for investment and people have to pay for it."
