The Department of Municipal Administration and Urban Development, which has taken up geo-tagging of urban properties using satellite data in the 72-erstwhile urban local bodies across the State, grossed up to ₹30 crore more in property tax last year.
This includes ₹24.90 crore from re-assessing over five lakh properties in various municipalities and another ₹5.10 crore by bringing in 20,100 properties that were hitherto undetected into the tax net. The CDMA, which is collecting a similar satellite mapping data of the newly-formed 68 municipalities, had earlier tied up with the National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC) to develop a special mobile application to geo-tag urban properties with the help of ‘Bhuvan’, an online platform, to make available maps and images.
“Using the technology, about 12.5 lakh properties were mapped and this was validated by tax data in the first exercise done for the 72 ULBs through which the under-assessed and un-assessed properties were unearthed,” said Director of Municipal Administration T.K. Sreedevi. In fact, while the department mops up tax revenues for the current financial year, there has been a pretty decent rise in the tax collection in the last couple of years from within the ULBs. The collection efficiency has steadily been increasing from 85.56% in 2015-16 with ₹243 crore collection to 86.08% in 2016-17 with ₹284 crore and 91.25% with ₹328 crore collection the last year.
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About 15 ULBs achieved cent % collection, and another 28 collected 95% more, while 30-odd municipalities had tax collection from 80% to 95%. This was possible owing to the training given to 770 bill collectors in geo-tagging properties, online payment gateways, provisional assessment of property tax through online building permission system, periodic reviews to identify high-due lists and top performers. As part of the institutional building capacity, a Property Tax Board was constituted in which about 5,917 revision petitions have already been received.
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Under the newly initiated Development Permission Management System (DPMS) for online clearance of building permissions, a total of 67,596 applications were received, of which 54,071 were cleared and 3,904 were rejected, realising an amount of ₹250 crore, she added.