‘State issued 1.90 lakh trade licenses online in FY 2023-24’

Kolkata: The Urban Development and Municipal Affairs (UDMA) department has issued 1.90 lakh trade licenses in 2023-24 fiscal through its online based real-time trade license issuing mechanism.

Since the inception of the online mechanism in 125 civic bodies across the state from October 1, 2020, the department has sanctioned over 4.87 lakh trade licenses, 2.31 lakh trade licenses being auto renewed during the 2023-24 financial year.

“Trade licenses need to be renewed every year but since the introduction of e-system, the provisions for renewal up to 15 years were made available,” a UDMA department official said.

The total number of online building plans (e-grihankasha) sanctioned is 52,966. The online building plan system was rolled out for 60 municipalities from August 2021 and in another 63 civic bodies in the next phase.

“The time for building plan sanction, if all relevant documents are submitted, is presently taking 20-25 days. In physical mode it took almost six months. The target is to bring it down to 15 days,” the official said.

The department collected over Rs 193.41 crore through property tax till the end of 2023-24 fiscal from 3237443 assesses of 102 urban local bodies brought under its aegis.

In case of e-mutation, rolled out effectively from November 2021, the department till the end of 2023-24 FY issued over 1.80 lakh mutations with 86,706 e-mutations issued in 2023-24 itself.

A department official said the introduction of the online services is a major intervention towards Ease of Doing Business (EODB). “There was no uniformity among the ULBs (except Kolkata Municipal Corporation and Howrah Municipal Corporation) in these matters and each of them had their own way. Often, there were complaints of inordinate delay in building plan sanction or granting of trade license. With the online system in place we are able to monitor things and can seek explanations from municipalities for

delay,” he added.

The state government rolled out a toll free helpline number 18003458251, a dedicated help desk at Nagarayan and an email id [email protected] for answering queries related to

these services.