Hyderabad, India: Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) in India announced deployment of GIS, in order to dig out several un-assessed properties in the city. These properties have secured all the necessary civic clearances and construction has also been completed, but they have not been assessed and therefore, the owners are avoiding paying the corporation the property tax.
As per the TOI report, the GHMC identified two agencies -Vayum Technologies and Vensoft, to be entrusted with the job of identifying the unassessed properties. They will begin their work from next week, sources said. To begin with, the two agencies will first survey on a pilot basis two (each docket has about 3,000 to 4,000 properties), one in Serilingampally and another in Kapra municipal circle.
The GHMC woke up to the fact that lakhs of properties are thriving without being assessed after the corporation officials compared the data they have with the census figures. As per the recent census data, there are 20 lakh households in Greater Hyderabad whereas the records with the civic body show that only 12.5 lakh properties have been assessed by them. Of the properties of which the GHMC has the records, 10.5 lakh are residential and two lakh commercial properties. The Central Power Distribution Company Limited, the state power utility, too established that lakhs of properties are not on the radar of the GHMC since as per its records, there are about 16 lakh domestic connections in Greater Hyderabad.
The two agencies entrusted with the task of unearthing the errant properties will use Google maps or any other satellite images of the areas to measure the buildings, find out the nature of the usage of the building, type of construction, number of floors and other related details. They will then check whether the particular building is assessed or not by carrying out a physical verification. If the building is already under the property tax net, the staffers will take measurements of the plinth area and usage (commercial or residential) of the building. This data will be correlated with the data available with the municipal corporation. For this work, the agencies will be paid INR 25 per each property.
“This pilot exercise will be completed in a month. If the results are encouraging and useful, it would be extended to other areas of the city. In order to check the agencies work, a random third party verification will also be done,” a senior official told TOI.
Officials said by bringing the unassessed properties into the tax net, officials hope they could get net INR 1,000 crore in the current financial year. In the last financial year 2011-12, GHMC had collected INR 634 crore from property tax against its target of INR 752 crore.
After the entire exercise the GHMC hopes it would get at least INR 100 crore additional tax collections from the unassessed properties and under assessed properties.
Source: TOI
