Pune Cantt CEO,member spar over ‘irregularities’

Kedari said that the assessment of properties done by the cantonment board has raised eyebrows. “People have got inflated bills and some of them have received the bills in lakhs,” he alleged.

Kedari said that he was keeping mum and didn’t want to expose the “wrongdoings of the cantonment board CEO.” However,Pune Cantonment MLA Ramesh Bagwe,who was present at the meeting told Kedari that his job was to bring any such issues to the notice of cantonment board. It was only on the intervention of PCB president Aniruddha Chakravarty that the tempers cooled in the meeting and the board finalised the proposal for increase in the vehicle entry free.

The board later passed the proposal to increase the vehicle entry tax by 50 per cent in all major categories of transportation including the motor buses and transport vehicles carrying the passengers and private service vehicles carrying corporate employees.

Kedari earlier alleged that the details of increase in property tax were dodgy and that his complaints to the board have fallen on deaf ears.

The board meeting also considered the application from one private agency which had offered to collect the vehicle entry fee on commission basis as the term of the present contractor was ending later this month.

However,the board meeting lost precious minutes in the squabble between the CEO and the board member Kedari and it was finally decided that it will keep an option of granting the permission on collection of vehicle entry fee to other parties. The board was however unanimous that the percentage of commission which was quoted by the private agency to the PCB shouldn’t exceed 18.5 percent,the rate on which the Khadki cantonment board (KCB) has awarded the job to it.

The cantonment board also stressed that in order to ensure that it doesn’t go into losses,the private agency hired for the collection of vehicle entry fee gets the target from the board. Koshy insisted in the meeting that the board has the records of day-to-day collection of vehicle entry fee based on which the private agency will be given the targets.

“The exemptions which are granted for levy of vehicle entry fee to various categories of vehicles shall remain the same,” said Koshy.