Urban News

Indian Express 06.01.2010

To nail tax evaders, govt offers MCD geographic survey details

The biggest municipality in South and Southeast Asia, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD), also is one of the poorest.

The reason: property tax collected this year comes from merely 20 per cent of existing property owners. Now, the civic body is planning to force tax evaders to pay up.

For this, the Delhi government has sent a proposal to the MCD to use Delhi State Spatial Data Infrastructure to increase its collection. The geo-spatial survey of Delhi reveals that though tax is collected only from eight lakh properties, more than 40 lakh properties exist in the city.

The proposal sent by the government’s IT department entails that all manual property tax data available with the MCD be integrated with the data generated from GIS (Geographic Information System) survey done by Delhi State Spatial Data Infrastructure.

The idea is to centrally manage all property records.

IT Secretary Savitur Prasad said: “The property holders may be given a unique id and a tamperproof property passbook with feature like bio-cryptic barcode or latent image security.”

The move will ensure that records of all stakeholders can be then updated centrally. The property holders will be charged one-time for database creation and issuance of the passbook. The assessment, tax collection and related administrative process shall be done by the MCD. The IT department has also suggested that the Jeevan interface can be used for payment of property tax, sources said.

The civic body will now hold a meeting with the Delhi government next week to discuss the proposal.