The Hindu 06.11.2013
GVMC to continue drive against tax leakage
Property tax is the main source of income for municipal corporations and unless leakages are plugged it is difficult to get more revenue. The GVMC has started one such exercise and having realised its efficacy wants to continue it.
At a recent meeting when the issue of granting funds to municipal corporations was raised, the Chief Minister too expressed the view that municipalities should be able raise their resources though statutory grants would be released.
The annual increase in property tax of the GVMC on an average is Rs. 5 crore. Several corporations have been able to raise their property tax revenue. Compared to them, the corporation has not realised its potential and not able to collect what it should have, says Municipal Commissioner M.V. Satyanarayana.
The Bangalore Municipal Corporation, on the other hand, carried out the Geographic Information System (GIS) mapping to assess property tax by using the services of 400 outsourced persons and carried out an exercise for more than two-and-a-half years. Base maps of the National Remote Sensing Centre were used in the GIS exercise. After the GIS exercise, camps were organised in the wards to enable citizens compare and contest the tax arrived at. On the other hand, GVMC’s experiments with the GIS had not yielded the expected result. After the GIS, a verification carried out revealed that several star hotels and malls have been under-assessed.
