KOCHI: The Corporation’s budget for the 2018-19 fiscal presented by Deputy Mayor T J Vinodh here on Saturday, which focuses on enhanced revenue generation, expects a revenue receipt of Rs 917.47 crore and expenditure of Rs 888.98 crore, with a Rs 15 crore surplus. It also revised the income estimate for the 2017-18 financial year to Rs 715.61 crore and expenditure to Rs 594.32 crore.
Municipal bond
The main proposal for revenue generation contained in the budget is to float a municipal bond to raise money for the ULB share (urban local body share) of Centrally-funded projects like Smart City Mission and AMRUT. “ This a debt security issued by the Municipal Corporation with security guaranteed by the government to finance the capital expenditure of the civic body. The idea is to start the bond this year. To secure the government’s nod, an agency has been appointed. We hope the ULB for implementing projects under the Smart City mission can be mobilised through the amount collected as bond,” said Vinodh.
Mopping up revenue
Value Capture Finance (VCF), an innovative urban-development funding and revenue generation tool; imposing additional service tax and levying a service charge on the Central Government firms in the city are the other major proposals for revenue generation. By imposing the additional service tax and the service charge, the civic body expects to rake in an additional Rs 10 crore and Rs 8 crore, respectively.
Besides, the proposals include imposing special charge on hospitals and three-star hotels, tax on tourist boats, collecting supervisory fee for hoardings and billboards, waste treatment processing fee and user fee for waste collection from commercial firms. The civic body expects a revenue receipt of around Rs 50 crore from these new tax proposals.
Redemption for road projects
The Deputy Mayor also allocated fund for the extending and improving the roads in the city. The land will be acquired for completing the development of major roads like Thammanam - Pullepady Road, Palluruthy 40-feet Road, Subhash Chandra Bose Road, Emmanuel Palli Road and Goshree-Mamangalam Road.
Helping hand for TGs
Interestingly, proposals also included construction of ‘Oruma’ home for transgender (TG)persons. A sum of `10 lakh has been earmarked for building the home and issuing of ID cards to the TGs. In a significant move, Rs 5 crore is set aside in the budget for mounting CCTV cameras along the various city roads. An electric feeder system from Metro station, marine walkway and Clean Air Kochi projects are the budget’s other major announcements. As was the case last year, the transport sector got a major allocation in this year’s budget. The civic body has allocated a whopping Rs 200 crore, including the Central and state government grants, for development projects in the transport sector.
Deja vu!
However, several of the proposals contained in the budget make the general public feel they have been through these before since it is almost a case of repackaging old wine in a new bottle - the expansion of city junctions into modern junctions, ‘She lodge’, cable removal, cycle track construction, signage policy, shopping complex at Kaloor, multilevel parking system, G Memorial Centre and e-governance, being the clearest instances of this.