GHMC is aiming to finish satellite imaging and survey of properties in the city by the year-end and bring all un-assessed and under-assessed structures into tax net from January next year.
The property tax collection is expected to leap by ₹200 to 300 crore after this process is completed, officials say.
The project, successfully implemented in Moosapet, involves capturing satellite images of properties at the first level, and identifying the un-assessed and under-assessed properties among them, through a second level physical verification.
To implement the project, the city has been divided into area-wise dockets based on the extent covered by each bill collector. The GHMC has demarcated a total of 378 dockets in all the 30 circles, and is now in the process of addressing overlaps and gaps among them.
“After this, the hand held devices of bill collectors will be mapped to the dockets, and each building in every docket will be vectorised through satellite imaging for easy identification,” an official shared.
Telangana State Remote Sensing Applications Centre has been handed over the job of vectorising the structures. Once vectorisation is completed, field survey will be carried out to verify each and every property on the ground, and bring it under the property tax net if it has not been assessed so far. Under-assessed properties too will be identified in the process.
Vacant land tax defaulters, unauthorised structures and illegal mobile towers too, will be captured during the process for penalisation. Centre for Good Governance (CGG) will design the special software required for the hand held devices to feed in the details. The job of field verification may be handed over to a private agency to be selected by CGG, instead of bill collectors, for maintaining transparency, officials informed.
“We aim to complete the process of vectorisation, software development and field survey by December this year, and keep ready fresh data for property tax assessment starting from January, so as to improve tax collection at the end of financial year,” the official said. Instructions have already been issued for completion of field verification in eight weeks across all the 30 circles, he said.
A pilot project done in Moosapet with satellite imaging has yielded the corporation over 6,000 un-assessed and 2,800 under-assessed properties, garnering an additional revenue of ₹21 crore.
As of now, there are close to 15 lakh property tax assessees in the city — 12 lakh residential, 2.5 lakh non-residential and 40,000 mixed. In 2018-19, GHMC earned over ₹1,400 crore revenue.
