Municipal Corporation Gurugram allots Rs 14 bn for waste management

The Municipal Corporation of Gurugram (MCG) has allocated Rs 14 billion for keeping the city clean and free of waste in the annual budget for financial year 2023-2024, carrying out its commitment to streamline the city's solid waste management process. Also, the civic government set aside Rs 9 billion for projects in the city to build roads and collect rainwater. In total, the budget forecast income collection of Rs 23 billion and budgeted roughly Rs 20 billion for expenditures.

The budget will be submitted for approval to the Haryana Urban Local Bodies (ULB). Municipal authorities stated that due to inaccurate information in the database, they were only able to collect Rs 1.74 billion in property tax last year instead of the Rs 11 billion they had anticipated. According to a private agency's January 2022 property tax survey, the number of properties subject to the tax has increased from 307,000 to 514,000.

Based on the poll, the MCG issued new property IDs and then requested residents' feedback. People alleged that the new IDs had inaccurate information, which led to a flawed database. As a result, officials claimed, they were unable to pay property taxes, which decreased revenue. Unlike in the past, when a special house meeting was called to review the budget plan with councillors, MCG commissioner PC Meena said they produced the budget after talking with their staff.

“Because the council members' terms expired in November of last year, we created the budget taking into account all development efforts and revenue collection. We have taken into account the tasks necessary for the growth of the city and have made sure that the public's needs are adequately met,” he stated.

Rs 14 billion have been set aside for health and sanitation services, said the officials. This area will include MCG's services for solid waste management, waste removal, sanitation, fogging, waste treatment at the Bandhwari landfill, building material recovery facilities, removing construction and demolition debris, and animal birth control programmes. Meena explained that their new strategy is to treat fresh garbage in every society and industry to lessen the load on the landfill. Each neighbourhood has its own compost pit, so doing the processing locally will make it simpler for People to deal with the leftover garbage.