It’s a windfall for GHMC as property tax collection crosses ₹1,200 cr.

For the first time, Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) has managed to collect more than ₹1200 crore property tax for the year 2016-17 till Friday evening and more money is expected to be mopped up by midnight considering that the counters remained open till then.

Last year, GHMC had collected around ₹1025.45 crore and so far, it is ₹175 crore more than the previous year thanks to the new assessments and correction of under assessments of properties. With regard to the new assessments of 42,255 properties, around ₹66.80 crore has been collected.

There are an estimated 14.2 lakh households in the twin cities of which 11.77 lakh are residential, 2.3 lakh commercial and 17,000 mixed properties.

Following reassessment of properties paying tax below ₹1200 and above ₹1200 a year, altogether around 2,54,384 new assessments have been made and around ₹264 .14 crore have been collected during this financial year, said GHMC Commissioner B. Janardhan Reddy.

He was happy about the ‘remarkable progress’ in the collection of property tax with various initiatives such as ‘Early Bird’ in April, ‘Lucky Draw Scheme’ in May, June and December, ‘Tsunami Survey’ of above ₹1 lakh non-residential properties, reassessing the properties paying tax of less than ₹ 1200 and wide publicity by sending messages to the households yet to pay tax during the demonetisation period last year.

Mr Reddy pointed out that during demonetisation period, as many as 1,74,650 tax payers paid their property tax of ₹146.74 crore and from among them 9,860 tax payers had not paid their property tax for more than two years and their payment amounted to ₹14.27 crore.