Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation (BMC) will start sending property tax notices informing residents of Salt Lake, Baguiati and parts of Rajarhat to pay their pending tax, officials of the civic body said.
The move, a senior civic official said, is to have “at least some money” in the civic body’s coffers from property tax proceeds.
Property tax collection has not been a strong point of the corporation, which is still dependent on doles from the state government and other agencies to run the civic body’s day-to-day functioning.
The situation is such that any development project in infrastructure undertaken by the corporation is either financed directly by the state government or by MLAs and MPs from their local area development funds.
The BMC had set a target of collecting Rs 294.56 crore in revenue in the 2022-23 fiscal, of which Rs 25 crore was to be earned from property tax collection, officials said.
“The 2022-23 civic budget had estimated that Rs 67 crore would be earned from property tax, outdoor advertisements and parking fee,” a civic official said.
An official in the corporation’s tax assessment and property mutation department said the target had been missed by a huge margin.
“We have been able to collect only around half the targeted amount. So we have decided to send notices to residents with property tax dues, asking them to pay up,” the official said.
Another senior civic official said property tax collection from wards in Salt Lake had been satisfactory, but collections from areas that were under the erstwhile Rajarhat-Gopalpur Municipality and the Mahisbathan Gram Panchayat II had been “very low”.
Apart from sending notices, the civic body is also planning to hold camps in neighbourhoods and housing complexes where defaulters can clear their tax dues.
Residents also have the option of paying their tax through their banks or at the headquarters or borough offices of the corporation.
Heart transplant at RN Tagore hospital
A 51-year-old man underwent a heart transplant at a private hospital off the EM Bypass last Wednesday. The donor was a 49-year-old man who suffered a road accident last week and was declared brain dead at another private hospital off the Bypass.
After the donor’s family members agreed, his heart was harvested by a team of doctors at Apollo Multispeciality Hospitals and sent to RN Tagore International Institute of Cardiac Sciences via a green corridor created by the police.
The transplant surgery started on Wednesday morning and continued till evening. “The surgery was especially challenging because of the condition of the recipient, who had to be hospitalised multiple times in the past six months for heart failure. His blood pressure had dipped to alarming levels,” said Mrinalendu Das, head of the department of cardiac surgery at the hospital.
The recipient is under observation and has been taken off ventilator, said an official at the hospital.