North civic body identifying property tax defaulters
In order to ramp up its tax revenues, the North Delhi Municipal Corporation has decided to issue unique identification cards for properties under its jurisdiction. The move will help the civic body to bring all the properties under the tax net and keep a tab on those who fail to pay up.
The north Delhi corporation is facing an acute cash-crunch and negotiations with the Delhi government for release of funds have not borne fruits so far. This has led the civic body to come up with initiatives to increase its revenues from all available sources.
Addressing the standing committee meeting on Wednesday, north Delhi municipal commissioner PK Gupta said attempts are being made to increase revenue through all available means.
Gupta said steps have been initiated to identify and register properties for the purpose of bringing them under tax net. Senior civic officials said a major chunk of revenue for the civic agencies come from the property tax but more than 65% of the property owners don’t pay their taxes.
As per the scheme, each property in the area would be issued specific codes and the owners of the properties would be issued a card and a passbook. The card will help streamline the process of tax payments and the pass- book would help keep a record of the payments made by the property owner.
“More than 10 lakh houses (individual owners) fall under the jurisdiction of the north corporation. But merely 3.5 lakh pay property tax, resulting in heavy losses. It is precisely for this purpose that we decided to launch the card and the passbook,” said a senior north body official.
Sources said over 15,000 properties in just two wards have been identified which were earlier not paying their tax. “Currently, the programme of identifying properties has been completed in two wards, Bharat Nagar and Inderlok. Once the identification is completed, we will verify our records with that of the Delhi government,” said Mohan Bhardwaj, chairman of the standing committee.
The civic body has spent ` 26.5 crore on the project, which is expected to take 18 months to finish.