The Chattogram City Corporation (CCC) authority has sought a grant of TK 100 crore from the central government as the revenue collection literally came down to zero for more than two months due to the general holiday amid the global coronavirus pandemic.
In addition to disrupting normal operations due to the funding crisis, the city authorities of the country's main port city Chattogram are also struggling to pay the salaries of officials and employees. If the grant is not made available soon the ongoing dengue prevention activities will be seriously hampered, officials said.
It is learnt that CCC usually collects about 70 percent of its annual revenue income during April to June. However, since the last week of March, none of the listed 195,000 municipal house owners have paid holding taxes. Till March Tk 93 crore has been collected only against the target of Tk 346 crore in 2019-20. However, the management and service sector of the corporation is run by the revenue income.
The government has decided to call off the general holiday since 31 May hoping to resume normal activities in the country.
Mofidul Islam, Chief Revenue Officer CRO of CCC, said that there are doubts about how much revenue could be collected within the remaining days of this month (June).
Although the collection of revenue was virtually stopped during general holidays, cleaning activities and health care institutions are continuing to operate as usual. Due to the coronavirus epidemic and also threats of dengue virus infection, there is a need to intensify municipal cleaning activities, but due to the financial crisis such activities have become difficult.
In Chattogram, a city of seven million inhabitants, the government has specially allocated only Tk 4 crore for strengthening the sanitation program and killing mosquitoes.
The corporation needs about TK 25 crore to run, a quarter of which is spent on cleaning, every month, excluding development work.
Mohammad Shamsuddoha, Chief Executive Officer of CCC said that in such a situation we applied to the government to allocate TK 100 crore as a grant to maintain regular activities. In this, TK 60 crore is needed for salary and regular expenditure till June. The rest of the amount will be spent for a cleaning program and fight to manage ongoing pandemic.”
The CCC owes about TK 110 crore as tax to various government departments. In addition to cash assistance from the government, the CCC has also sought the intervention of the government so that the concerned institutions can repay the money quickly.
