The mayoral council of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) on Wednesday approved a decision to allocate the right to manage parking in 189 parking lots to agencies selected through competitive bidding.
Each parking lot is made up of multiple parking stretches. These may be along the same road or on different roads.
The KMC had earlier floated tenders and selected companies and agencies to manage parking lots. Now that the mayoral council has given its nod, the agencies will he given the managing right.
There are 274 parking lots in the city, said a KMC official. The right to manage three parking lots was assigned to agencies earlier.
Of the remaining 271, the right to manage parking in 189 lots will soon be assigned to various agencies, the official said.
Till the new allocations are made, the KMC will earn a licence fee that was fixed a few years ago. The fee was increased when the latest tenders for allocating the right were floated.
“There will be a rise in the revenue we earn from parking,” said a KMC official.
The official said the space for car parking has increased.
“About 2,000 more cars can be parked on Kolkata’s roads when all 274 lots are handed to agencies. We have also added some roads on the list of fee parking stretches.”
The KMC has set a target to collect Rs 30 crore from parking in the financial year 2024-25. The revised estimate for 2023-24 for revenue from parking is Rs 20.92 crore.
The tenders to manage parking zones along roads in the city were floated in January 2023, for the first time in nine years. Multiple tenders were floated, each for a set of roads.
But the process had to be cancelled because of a procedural error.
The value of each tender was more than Rs 1 lakh.
The state government’s rules say the process of floating tenders with a value of Rs 1 lakh or more and submission of bids must be done electronically. But the KMC opted for the manual mode.
Illegally raising money from people by various parking rackets or overcharging by parking attendants are common across Kolkata.
Metro had reported on Monday how illegal parking receipts were being handed to drivers at some of the parking lots. These receipts, with the KMC’s name printed on them, mentioned Rs 20 as the hourly parking rate for cars.
The KMC has fixed a fee of Rs 10 an hour for cars.
A parking attendant was arrested near Deshapriya Park on Sunday on charges of cheating after police found him issuing printed receipts bearing the name of the KMC.
The KMC had in April last year discontinued the practice of issuing printed receipts and made it mandatory for all parking attendants to use point of sales machines to collect the fee and issue receipts generated by such machines.