No new taxes, movie tickets may cost more

NEWDELHI: Replicating the North Delhi Municipal Corporation’s move, the east civic body’s standing committee on Thursday has decided to drop a proposal to introduce new taxes in the budget for the financial year 2018-19.

The East MCD commissioner Ranbir Singh had last month proposed to introduce education, betterment and professional taxes.

During the budget presentation on Thursday, standing committee chairman Pravesh Sharma turned down the commissioner’s proposal to levy any of these taxes.

“We don’t want to put additional burden on property tax payers and that’s why a decision has been taken not to introduce new taxes proposed by the commissioner last month,” said Sharma.

But movie tickets in east Delhi may cost a little more with the standing committee chairman approved the proposal to increase theatre tax by 100 times. Theatre tax is paid by cinema hall owners to the MCD.

Now, class I theatres will have to pay ₹1,000 per show instead of the present ₹10 and class II theatres will pay ₹1,000 instead of ₹7 as theatre tax to the EDMC. This additional cost will be passed on to customers.

Sharma proposed to register all cyber cafes and computer centres in EDMC areas with the civic agency so that citizens can avail of its online services.

“Rather than visiting the zonal offices or headquarters, the residents can visit these cyber cafes, near their houses, and can avail of services related with EDMC, such as birth and death certificates, free of cost . Senior officials will conduct random checks on these cyber cafes to ensure there is no misuse of services,” said Sharma.

He proposed to introduce the face recognition technique to record attendance in EDMC schools. “It will minimise the scope for ‘proxy attendance’ in municipal corporation’s schools. We will implement the scheme in a phased manner,” he said.

To deal with 2,500 tonnes of garbage generated every day, the civic body has proposed to increase the capacity of the Ghazipur waste-to-energy plant. “We have asked the contractor to prepare a proposal to increase the consumption of garbage at the WTE plant from 1,300 MT per day to 2,500 MT per day,” said Sharma.

EDMC requested the to constitute a special advisory committee for the management and reclamation of Ghazipur landfill.