BHUBANESWAR: The Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation (BMC) on Wednesday formed a special squad to catch owners of shops and other commercial establishments who are running their business without trade licence.
It has come to the notice of BMC that many traders are running their business without a trade licence.
Until a year ago, the traders had to go to the civic body to apply for the trade licence by filing a self-declaration as to their type of business and its size. Ward officials also visit the traders and collect the fee according to the tariff slabs for different businesses and provide the certificate later. Now, however, the BMC and Bhubaneswar Smart City Limited (BSCL) have jointly made the process of obtaining trade licence online. This has helped the civic body bring more traders under the purview of trade licence. BMC commissioner Sanjay Kumar Singh has asked officials to carry out regular checks to make all the traders pay the trade licence fee online and obtain the certificate.
“Based on direction of the BMC commissioner, we have started the special drive to catch the trade licence evaders. If we find that a trader has been running his business without a certificate, he will be served a closure notice,” said BSCL general manager Kamaljit Das.
Das said although there are 28,000 traders in the city, who were enumerated during a survey by a private agency, a maximum of 14,000 have obtained trade licence.
Earlier, the BMC had database of only 13,000 traders as many new traders had not been identified resulting in the civic body losing revenue. The traders, who were not enrolled in the BMC database, never paid trade licence fee. Trade licence is an important component of BMC’s revenue.
