Live up to 100 years if you want to avoid property tax!

NEW DELHI: If you live in north Delhi, here's an incentive for you to stretch your life to past 100 years. The North Delhi Municipal Corporation proposes to exempt all senior citizens who have logged a century of years from paying property tax.

This bizarre proposal, with municipal body slated to go for polls in a few months, instantly invited criticism. “The current budget session is just seeing melodrama,“ fumed Mukesh Goel, leader of the opposition in the corporation. “How many senior citizens will you find who are 100 years or older?

How is this budget proposal going to help people?“ Angered by the announcements made by Parvesh Wahi, chairman of the civic body's standing committee, while finalising the budget for 2017-18 on Friday , Goel added, “There is no vision and no sense of responsibility for making the corporation financially independent.“

Wahi also proposed mea sures such as providing mobile phones to safai karamcharis, regularisation of 6,000 daily wagers, developing flower parks at the ward level, constructing 500 toilets for women in every ward and organising a monthly health camp for women in each ward.

In explanation, Wahi said, “We want to equip safai karamcharis with mobile phones to strengthen sanitation services. This will help to contact them directly because we will put their phone numbers in public domain. Also, we propose to regularise the appointments of 6,000 daily wagers against vacancies in various departments and give them insurance cover.“

Wahi claimed that the schemes to provide mobile phones to sanitation workers and construct toilets will be accomplished in the current fiscal. “We propose to construct two women's toilets and one for differently abled people in every ward,“ he said. “We have already started work on the construction of the toilets with the Swachh Bharat funds we received last year.“

Along with flower parks to be developed in wards that have more than 10 parks, with the blooms to be sold in the open market, the standing committee chairman also proposed to develop a `Medicity' at the Rajan Babu Institute of Pulmonary Medicine and Tuberculosis Hospital. This could be done through a public-private partnership to improve health services, he said.

Having listened to the proposals, Goel remarked, “These are old hat and are repeated every so often. The corporation is facing a financial crisis, and yet the standing committee chairman can offer nothing major to resolve the issue.“