VIJAYAWADA: Taxpayers’ Association has strongly criticised Vijayawada Municipal Corporation (VMC), whose staff allegedly threatened people of imposing penalties on them and deleting their names from various welfare schemes if they fail to pay user charges for garbage collection.
Addressing a press conference here on Tuesday, association general secretary MV Anjaneyulu said the civic body staff were violating procedures and threatening the public to pay the user charges for garbage collection.
“It’s against the law to demand user charges for garbage collection without serving demand notices on the public. The civic body staff are circulating pamphlets to ramp up their user charge collection drive,” he said.
Anjaneyulu also pointed out that VMC officials were forcing the public to pay the user charges to volunteers and did not issue the payment receipts. “In most of the cities, a majority of people refuse to pay the user charges. As per the law, the user charges must be used for the intended purpose only,” he said.
However, the sum of user charges for garbage collection collected by VMC is transferred to Clean Andhra Pradesh, which is against the law, he alleged.