Staff Reporter
GUWAHATI: The decision of the Public Works Department (Road), Assam, to hike contractors’ PWD registration fees has given jitters among the local contractors. They are seeking intervention from Chief Minister Dr Himanta Biswa Sarma to give them succour.
According to PWD sources, Class I contractors will have to pay Rs 5 lakh as registration fees against the existing Rs 1 lakh. The Class II contractors, on the other hand, will have to pay Rs 2 lakh registration against the existing Rs 75,000. The class-III contractors will now have to pay Rs 1 lakh as registration fees against the existing Rs 50,000.
According to sources, these revised rates of registration fees will affect the local small-time contractors badly. For bigger firms, paying Rs 5 lakh as a registration fee is not a huge burden.
This is not all. According to sources, what seems even more stringent is that, unlike the existing system of refunding the registration fee in the event of the death of a contractor or his withdrawal of registration, the new system does not have any provision for refunding the registration fees.
The department enhances registration fees of contractors after a certain interval of time. According to official sources, the department wants to streamline the existing system of contractors’ registration that enables a section of contractors who cannot meet the schedules after getting contracts and make projects suffer delays.
A few contractors say that the massive hike in registration fees will put hurdles before most of the contractors in renewing their registrations. The state has several small-time contractors who eke out their living through PWD works. “We, the contractors of the state, including those working at the district level, will get into a huddle and appeal to the Chief Minister to be benevolent to the local contractors,” one of the contractors said.
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