City corporation decides to conduct fresh survey of all its property

The exercise is meant to bring them under the purview of tax to augment revenue

Members and officials participating in a meeting in the Mangaluru City Corporation Council on Friday.

Mangaluru City Corporation will conduct a fresh survey of its property in its all 60 wards to ensure that all were brought under the purview of property tax to augment the revenue collection.

It will conduct the door-to-door survey using its multi-purpose workers who will use a mobile application to record data and images of property. The survey is GIS linked.

According to Commissioner of the corporation Akshy Sridhar, the trial run of the survey is under progress in Kodialbail ward (No 30) since a month.

The corporation will take up the actual survey on February 1 and it might take a minimum of 45 days to complete it, covering all wards.

This time, the surveyors will record the type of floors based on the construction material used (such as granite, tiles and red oxide) as the property tax differed for the type of floors. Recording the type of floors is also to ensure that the property tax payers should not mislead the civic body while paying tax under the self-assessment scheme.

After the commissioner informed about the survey during the meeting of the council on Friday, Leader of the Opposition in the council Abdul Ravoof suggested that the civic body hire the services of professionals to conduct the survey. As the multi-purpose workers have enough work to do, the corporation should get the survey done by trained personnel, he said and added that the multi-purpose workers are now overloaded with other works mainly related to the health sector.

Responding to it, the commissioner said that as the multi-purpose workers are familiar with the wards allocated to them, they can conduct the survey efficiently. In case a need arises, the corporation can hire the services of others to conduct the survey, he said.