Thousands of residential properties in unauthorised colonies in North Delhi will soon be brought under the tax net. The North Delhi Municipal Corporation (NMC) will be issuing a unique property identification code to each of the properties and start collecting property tax from them subsequently. The move aims at augmenting the revenue without increasing the existing tax rate or imposing any new tax.
The unique property identification code (UPIC) will also enable the civic body to maintain a database of each property under its jurisdiction. According to officials, this will significantly augment the revenue collection through property tax, which is a major source of its income. A senior officer said the bidding process for hiring the agency will begin from the second week of July and the contract will be awarded within the subsequent 15 days. “We are hoping to begin the survey from August. Apart from the regularised colonies, the survey will also be conducted on unauthorised regularised colonies and urbanised villages,” the official said.
An independent agency will be hired by the civic body for conducting a survey of the existing properties, map the buildings and on the basis of its size and other factors, print out a bill on the spot. The corporation will be spending Rs 12 crore for surveying the properties under its jurisdiction so that each property can be given the UPIC.
The provision for this fund has also been made in the budget proposal for the year 2013-14. Officials said that the hand-held devices will be GPS-enabled so that the data captured from it can also be transferred on real-time basis to the property tax server at the data centre of the Corporation.
Meanwhile, to expedite the process, the corporation has diluted the terms and conditions in the tender documents. As per NMC, an estimated 40 lakh properties exist in the Capital, but only 10 lakh are assessed for property tax due to the absence of proper data. Similarly, there are around nine lakh properties in North Delhi but only one-thirds pay the tax.