To strengthen its hold over the city ahead of the forthcoming civic polls, the Left Front-led Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) has begun rehashing the schemes introduced by the Trinamool Congress board earlier.

The civic body has restarted the tax exemption scheme for selected charitable institutes, introduced by the former mayor Subrata Mukherjee, a Trinamool member.

Interestingly, Mayor Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharya had discarded the scheme after he joined the office saying that the KMC lost revenue due to such schemes.

The KMC has set up a two-member committee to decide about providing tax exemption to charitable institutions of the city. The committee has already short-listed 51 institutions for providing tax relief for five years. Some of these institutes received only one-year exemption during the tenure of Mukherjee.

The institutes that will enjoy the tax relief include Missionaries of Charity, Behala Blind School, Birla Mandir and Calcutta Muslim Orphanage. Earlier, the KMC had exempted the Ramakrishna Mission Sevasadan, the Nakoda Masjid, Tipu Sultan Mosque and Metiabruz Sahi Imambara from the purview of property tax.

Blame game has already begun between the ruling party and the opposition. “As per the reports of the public accounts committee, the KMC is losing huge revenues. They have started the tax exemption scheme but earlier they abandoned the scheme saying it was a wastage of money,” said Mukherjee.

“Tax relief for five years is unnecessary and is merely an election strategy at the cost of the public money,” added Mukherjee.

Bhattacharya, however, said: “The process of implementing the scheme was not transparent earlier. Some institutes used to get tax relief in arbitrary way. So we disbanded the scheme. Now we are doing it in a systematic manner to strengthen the social security.”

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