Recently the Coimbatore Corporation collected ₹11.21 crore in dues from two telecom service providers. The Corporation said it had collected ₹1.73 crore from a company as track rent for 2016 – 2021 for optical fibre cables it had beneath city roads and ₹9.48 crore from another company as track rent for 2018 – 2021.
The Corporation collected the track rent, a non-tax source of revenue, based on instructions from Commissioner Raja Gopal Sunkara after it came to light at a review meeting that the two telecom service providers had not cleared dues.
Sources said a GST-related issue delayed the payment of track rent by a company and it paid up after the company and the Corporation sorted out the issue.
The collection of track rent has been one of Corporation’s source of non-tax revenue ever since the State Government passed an order allowing urban local bodies to levy track rent on telecom service providers. It had fixed ₹6,300 a km as track rent for Coimbatore Corporation and a few other corporations.
The Corporation had collected ₹53.47 lakh from telecom service providers as track rent in 2007-08. From there it saw the rent collection increase to ₹3.43 crore in 2019-20. For the 2021-22 financial year, the Corporation had projected ₹2.80 crore as the rent.
Likewise, the Corporation had in 2011 decided to levy ₹30,000 a year as rent on telecom service providers for each of the cell phone towers they had erected within the city. It had also decided to treat as commercial those residential buildings housing the towers.
This was a part of the Corporation’s efforts to widen its tax net to boost revenue. While it managed to levy tax at commercial rate for residential buildings with towers it could not charge telecom service providers for towers erected because of a court case, said sources.
Now with the Corporation once again trying to boost its revenue, it could look at an early resolution for the court case to start charging companies for towers, the sources added.
