Delegation of FICO meets Secretary-Cum- Director of Industry, Punjab

Ludhiana, November 3, 2014: A delegation of FICO under the leadership of Gurmeet Singh Kular (President, Federation of Industrial & Commercial Organisation) met Raminder Singh (Secretary-Cum- Director of Industry, Punjab) at Chandigarh regarding rollback of water and sewerage sharing charges imposed by Municipal Corporation, Ludhiana.

Delegates apprised the secretary that the interoffice memo’s dated 23.10.1992 and 23.03.2005 clearly mentions the applicability for sharing the infrastructure cost to independent institutions such as Hospitals, Urban Estate, Improvement Trust, Industrial area, schools, colleges etc. and not to the individual industrial entities.

All the industrial entities have been provided as per their requirement the connections for water supply and sewerage services and are being billed regularly on periodical bases.

The cost per unit of the services provided is determined by the corporation taking into account the fixed cost for setting up the infrastructure and the running/variable cost being incurred continuously. Once the industry is paying as per the unit cost billed by the Municipal Corporation, then we don’t find any logic for the Municipal Corporation to issue demand notice to the industrial units after more than 22 years have passed when first interoffice memo was issued.

There is no mention of any gazette notification issued by the State Government in this regard and if there is any notification, then why it is not been implemented for such a long time. Because logically the cost of infrastructure has already been factored into the cost of water/sewerage services being provided to the industry as per annual bills being raised on regular bases.

Industry has already decided not to pay these charges because it is not applicable on individual intuitions.    

Rajiv Jain and Satnam Singh Makkar were among those included in delegation. 

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