ISLAMABAD: The Metropolitan Corporation Islamabad (MCI) has decided to charge the owners of residential and commercial property in the capital’s urban areas for garbage collection, saying that will be used to improve sewerage and sanitation services.

Today’s (Monday) MCI session will take up the issue and the corporation will impose the charges with the approval of the house.

MCI Director Sanitation Sardar Khan Zimri said the MCI does not charge for garbage collection or street cleaning services.

If approved at MCI session today, the corporation will call tender to outsource garbage collection in city

“We only collect around Rs100 per house as a conservancy charge, which includes road maintenance, parks maintenance, streetlights etc, so we have no funds to improve our sanitation services,” he said.

If approved by the house, he said, the MCI will outsource garbage collection in the capital. Mr Zimri said the proposed rates for garbage collection will vary be sector, houses in E sectors would be charged Rs4 per square feet of covered area per year, houses in the F sectors would be charged Rs3 per sq ft and houses in G and I sectors would be charged Rs2 per sq ft. Residents of I-8, however, would have to pay Rs3 per sq ft.

Mr Zimri said that the new charges are expected to bring in more than Rs1 billion per year to be spent on garbage collection and disposal.

Asked about the rural areas, he said that the MCI will work out a system to collect and dispose of garbage through union council chairmen. He claimed that the MCI has placed bins in some union councils where residents can dispose of waste for the MCI to collect.

The MCI only collects garbage in urban areas, with few arrangements for the capital’s rural outskirts.

MCI staff has been collecting garbage from the F sectors while garbage collection in the G sectors has been outsourced. A contract to collect garbage in I-8 and I-10 was discontinued by the MCI last month because of a lack of funding.

Although the MCI was collecting garbage itself in I sectors, residents said the corporation did not have enough staff to meet the area’s requirements. Sources said that the staff of the former contractor collected garbage in a private capacity from many homes in these sectors, particularly in I-10.

The contractor for the G sectors also stopped collecting garbage because staff had not been paid. A public outcry led the Capital Development Authority (CDA) to pay the contractor to resume collection after almost a week.

The MCI, which was formed in 2016, does not have financial and administrative rules in place to function. It has Rs2bn in its accounts generated from various municipal receipts that it is unable to spend because there are no rules in place.

Mayor Sheikh Anser Aziz said that the MCI is trying to have its rules finalised, and there would not be a situation where garbage collection charges could not be used.

He said the garbage collection charges are being imposed to provide citizens with better services. “After approval from the house, we will call tender to outsource garbage collection from the city areas,” he said.

The MCI also revised property taxes in the capital last year, increasing them by 200pc. However, it has not been able to collect these taxes because they are being collected by the CDA.

“The collection of property tax is our domain, but the CDA is collecting it in violation of the rules. However, we are also collecting it,” Mayor Aziz said.

He said he wrote to the CDA asking the authority not to collect property taxes, but the revenue directorate “did not pay any heed to my letter and issued the property tax bill with the CDA logo”.

CDA officials said that since the revenue directorate is partially divided between both organisations, it is up to the government to decide how taxes will be shared between them.

Published in Dawn, September 30th, 2019