Water tax put on hold again

The reason behind this delay is the civic body’s indecisiveness regarding the billing process. KMC is in a fix whether to bill the landlord or the tenant for supplying filtered municipal water.

The Assessment and Water Supply departments of the civic body are jointly preparing the bill that will be issued to the citizens. But, officers involved in preparing the bill have no idea if the bill will be in the name of the landlord or the tenants of a property.

“If KMC bills just the landlords, it will earn revenue of approximately Rs 5 crores. But, if it bills the landlords and the tenants, the revenue will be more than Rs 25 crores,” said a Senior Officer of the Water Supply Department.

“We are yet to decide if KMC will bill the landlord or the tenants. It will take some time for us to fix the matter. Hence, the implementation of the water tax system will take a longer time,” said Mayor, Bikash Ranjan Bhattcharya.

Apart from complexities in the billing process, delay in installing water meters has also affected the implementation of the scheme. KMC is supposed to supply water to 2, 68,000 households. Out of these, water meters have been installed only in 194 places. Most of these connections are in multistoried residential complexes located in Eastern and Southern part of the city like Meghamallar near Gariahat. A two-member team of the Water Supply Department collects the tax from these residential complexes.

On an average, the total amount of water supplied from the 19 boosting-pumping stations is about 270 million gallons. To serve a population of 45 lakhs, Kolkata needs a supply of 300 million gallons of water, per day.