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Registration offices in TN to work even on the auspicious festival days to help public
Posted on: 14/Apr/2021 9:53:01 AM
The commercial department has given instructions to the registrar offices to work during three national holidays like Tamil New Year or Chithirai Thirunal day on 14th April, Aadi Perukku on 8th September and Thai Poosam on 18th January. It is learnt that additional charges would be collected from the people on these days for registration of properties. The main objective behind this was to increase the revenue during the auspicious Tamil festival days.
Government order or GO has been issued by the Principal Secretary of the Commercial Tax Department, Beela Rajesh. According to the GO, the registration department must keep all the offices open on these 3 above said auspicious days and collect additional fees applicable as per table of fees that has been prescribed by the TN government. There are as many as 578 sub registration offices in TN and this was revealed by the Registration Department sources. It is learnt that the annual revenue of this department is around Rs 11000 crores.
Several government staff are unhappy now about this move. A government staff in Chennai spoke about how festivals like Diwali, Christman and Ramzan were also auspicious days and the new trend of opening offices on the auspicious days would result in no public holidays for them. This would be against the labour laws.
According to an official, in a year there are more than 20 auspicious days and that accounts for 25% of overall document registrations. He spoke about how the workload is normally high during Amavasas and on Fridays etc. He added that the objective was to help the public and to earn additional revenue and this practise has been there for many years. Point is that even Hindu Religious and Charities Endowment Department has been collecting darshan fees in the temples on the auspicious days.
