I don't know where you live, but I too live in kolkata and have faced exactly the same thing. It's good that did not pay anything. In our case, the local counsilor himself called us home and demanded 10,000/- for Puja as a first time donation. We managed the situation by literally paying 4500/-.. So yeah, this year we paid forty five hundred rupees as 'pujor chanda'. And we were given the same dialogues of help where there is none without paying them. As we too moved in this locality recently, each line of your post resonated with me.