The Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) has mooted a proposal to levy user fee for Solid Waste Management (SWM) in the city. The proposal links SWM user fee with the electricity bill fixing different slabs for residential and commercial connections. The user fee for residential households varies from ₹30 to ₹500, while for commercial establishments, it varies from ₹75 to ₹1,200, depending on the consumption of electricity.
The SWM user fee will be decided based on the quantum of the electricity bill and will come added in the bill, which one has to pay the Bangalore Electricity Supply Company (Bescom), which will in turn reimburse it to the Bengaluru Solid Waste Management Ltd. (BSWML), the new parastatal charged with collection, transportation, and processing of waste in the city.
If this policy comes into force, the policy of asking commercial establishments and bulk generators to handle their waste through empanelled vendors will also be scrapped and the civic body will collect, transport, and process that garbage too, at a premium cost compared to residential units.
The proposal, pending approval before the State government, has got a shot in the arm with the High Court of Karnataka, hearing Public Interest Litigations on SWM on Monday, directed the civic body to take appropriate steps as early as possible to levy SWM user fee as per Solid Waste Management Rules, 2016. It also said the civic body doesn’t need prior approval of the State government to levy user fee.
Most big cities in the country, including Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai, Pune, and Indore, among others, have already levied SWM user fee to the extent that it generates enough revenue to meet the expenses of SWM in the city, a senior civic official said.
The annual garbage cess being collected with property tax in the city is meeting less than 10% of the SWM expenses of the civic body. BSWML is expected to generate around ₹850 crore annually from this user fee. The city spends just over ₹1,000 crore on SWM every year currently. This will be additional revenue and help the civic body expand its resource base.
Govt. yet to approve policy
While the BBMP is waiting for an approval from the State government to start levying SWM user fees, it will likely be a political decision. Amidst opposition to recent power tariff hikes, this policy would only add to the power bills in the city. “The government may waive SWM user fee also for those consuming less than 200 units of power and getting a zero bill under the Gruha Jyothi scheme. If not, there won’t be any zero bills in the city,” a senior BBMP official said.
“We toyed with the idea of linking it to property tax or water supply bills. But this will only lead to a lot of leakage. In many cases, several houses in a single plot are declared as a single property to save tax. Many residential complexes with many housing units again have a single water metre. But Bescom power connections are usually to single households and thus best suited to plug leakage. For instance, while the property tax database records around 29 lakh properties, Bescom has given over 52 lakh connections in the city,” a senior BBMP official said.
