In bizarre tit for tat, the cash-strapped Patna Municipal Corporation has used garbage as a weapon against one longtime holding tax defaulter and angered thousands of residents by dumping truckloads of stinking garbage at a market complex he owns.
Workers of the PMC engaged in disposing garbage were so frustrated with Avinash Kumar, owner of the J.P. Market in Kankarbagh area, for failure to pay `1.64 lakh holding tax accumulated over 12 years that they unloaded three trucks carrying garbage in the market complex on Monday. The area’s residents, affronted by the incident and assailed by the stench, protested on Tuesday by blocking a road and burning bold tyres. This forced PMC workers to remove the garbage later in the day.
But officials the PMC, blamed for the unpleasant garbage piles seen rotting across the Bihar capital, said they had no other option as Mr Kumar had been refusing to pay up the dues and had even threatened the officials who had visited him to collect the sum. The angry officials, who said such tax evaders were the cause of the PMC’s inability to pay salaries of hundreds of its employees, also warned that similar tactic could be used against other “incorrigible defaulters”.
The BSEB, which has to pay about `200 crores to the PMC as taxes, could be the next target of angry PMC workers who said they were waiting to repeat the garbage dumping exercise at Vidyut Bhavan.