BBMP budget: Old wine in new bottle

As expected, the BBMP on Thursday presented a surplus budget of Rs 1.80 crore for the year 2012-13 with a total expenditure of a whopping Rs 9,498.90 crore. This is nearly Rs 100 crore more than the previous budget. Most of the works mentioned in the previous budget have been included as spill-over works.

K A Muneendra Kumar, chairman of the BBMP’s Standing Committee on Finance and Taxation, who presented the budget at the Kempegowda auditorium of the civic body’s central office, said the main sources of revenue  are loans, grants from the Union government under the JNNURM scheme and the State Finance Commission’s allocations.

It hopes to collect Rs 2,000 cr as property tax this year, he added.

Estimations: According to the budget estimation for 2012-13, total receipts are expected to be Rs 9,288.95 crore which includes Rs 2,075.50 crore from tax revenue, Rs 1,915.04 crore non-tax revenue, Rs 1,887.35 crore government grants and Rs 3,411.06 crore miscellaneous receipts. The total expenditure is estimated to be Rs 9,498.9 crore consisting of a revenue expenditure of Rs 2,628.77 crore and a capital expenditure of Rs 6,870.13 crore.

Major Receipts: The major tax receipts are from property tax (Rs 2,000 crore), advertisement tax (Rs 75.05 crore) and trade licence fee (Rs 90 crore). The budget also proposes to raise `1,000 crore from municipal bonds. It takes into account total grants of Rs 6,448 crore, including Rs 484 crore from the 13th Finance Commission, Rs 751 crore Special Development Grants from the state government, Rs 500 crore of Megacity Revolving Fund, Rs 150 crore from Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal (JNNURM) Mission,  and Rs 100 crore for works to be taken up under Tender SURE.

Apart the from steps taken to mobilise resources and actions taken for tax collection, additional resources through optical fibre cable policy, advertisement policy, trade licence fee, the BBMP’s total tax revenue is estimated at Rs 1,650 crore.

Sarvagrama Abhyudaya Programme: The main development scheme announced in the budget is the “Sarvagrama Abhyudaya Programme” aimed at providing infrastructure facilities  to the 110 villages that come under the BBMP limits at a cost of Rs135 crore.

This is said to be announced keeping an eye on the Legislative Assembly elections scheduled to be held next year.

The BBMP proposes to establish a technical cell  for property tax collection using IT enabled services, GIS based road maintenance, make quoting PID number and unique road number for transfer of development rights, implement biometric-based khatas and biometric attendance for all its employees.

Experts’ Take: The experts said, considering the poor record of the BBMP in implementing its works, it is unlikely that the civic body would live up to its own expectations.

It has not even not even achieved 50 per cent progress in the last year’s budget (size Rs 9398.55 crore).

As per the revised expenditure, the BBMP could spend only Rs 3,809.22 crore, besides failing to fully utilise funds provided by the state and the Union governments.