Nagpur: Standing Committee of Nagpur Municipal Corporation (NMC) has recently proposed 15 percent “Special Sanitation Tax” on annual letting value on commercial establishments including hotels, restaurants, function halls, lawns and hospitals. And this additional tax is fifth new tax to be incorporated into property tax as NMC has approved four new taxes sewerage benefit tax, water benefit tax, road benefit tax and education tax, increasing existing house tax by almost 40 percent.
Gaining knowledge of this proposal targeting hotels with special sanitation tax, Nagpur Residential Hotels Association (NRHA) called a special general body meeting presided by its president Prakash Trivedi, wherein the members present strongly condemned this new tax proposal and requested NMC to withdraw this proposal.
Prakash Trivedi said that due to global recession hotel industry is already passing through a very bad patch of phase, never before such situation was experienced by hotel industry and proposing additional tax would further harm already critical industry. One of the biggest drawback of hotels is that our expenditure is fixed, irrespective of rooms occupy or not we have to keep facilities working and another drawback, our losses are irrecoverable because with every night passed, room gone vacant registers permanent loss.
Tejinder Singh Renu, secretary of NRHA said Section 137(1) of Maharashtra Municipal Corporation Act 1965 do empowers Corporation to impose such a tax, however only on ‘Large Premises’, while Nagpur has very few hotels with can be categorized as large premises. Our members have small properties many of them small lodges having just 15-20 rooms; under such circumstances levying additional tax is surely unjustified. Furthermore this Sec 137(1) of MMC Act violates Article 14 of constitution too.
Renu said, instead of imposing new tax, it is highly recommended that NMC should cut their spending. Losses accumulated due to LBT should not be recovered from chosen few businesses as they are already being burdened by high rate of other taxes.
Others present in the meeting were NRHA vice president Inderjeet Singh Baweja, treasurer Santosh Gupta, joint secretary Vinod Joshi, members Rajendra Huda, Nagesh Wazalwar, Durgesh Jaiswal, Vinod Chourasiya, Vijay Jaiswal, Tarun Motwani, Pravin Adnay, Hemant Selokar, Sudhir Jaiswal, Sanjay Agrawal, Vikram Trivedi, Vijay Sawarkar, Rajan Mulani, Umesh Kathal, Deepak Khurana, Amit Mudliar, Manish Jaiswal, Sharique Hafiz, Abhishek Tiwari, Hitendra Sharma, Swapnil Warambhe, Omprakash Gupta, V. M. Dua, Sunil Gupta, Shyam Shankar Mishra, Suresh Gupta, K. M. Trivedi, Nitin Trivedi, Mahesh Trivedi, R. K. Jaiswal, Sunil Kadoo, Shivchand Daharwal, Prakash Ramrakhiyani, Afzal Bhai and others.
