Waste collection charge hiked seven-fold in city
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The city corporation, which has been waging a losing battle against solid waste management, has planned to revise the annual waste collection charges by seven times for marriage halls, community centres and hotels.
According to corporation sources, the city on an average day generates close to 4,200 to 4,400 tones of solid waste and the waste collection surges during the marriage days and holidays. The corporation had earlier fixed the user charges in the multiples of Rs4,000 depending on the size of the marriage hall and its seating capacity.
These annual rates were fixed seven years ago and were not revised even when the property tax rates were regularised in suburbs.
For instance marriage halls with less than 500 member seating capacity were paying `4,000 and now they would be paying close to Rs28,000.
Similarly large halls, which had a seating capacity of above 1,000 members were earlier paying Rs12,000 per annum and now after the revision they have to shell out around Rs86,000. With the merger of several suburbs with the city corporation, the number of marriage halls and community centres has gone up.
The council has adopted the resolution in this regard and the new user charges collected for waste disposal would augment the corporation revenue. The civic body spends close to `4,00 crore to dispose the waste from city.
Meanwhile, the opposition councillors are gearing up to protest the corporation’s move to privatise garbage collection in more wards. “Waste management is the basic function of the city corporation and privatisation of garbage collection is adding to the existing woes. The civic body should recruit more workers to remove the solid waste,” Mr Subash Chandra Bose, DMK floor leader in the city corporation said.
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