HYDERABAD: The Telangana Legislative Assembly on Saturday passed the Core Urban Region (Integrated Governance) Bill, 2026, replacing the 70-year-old Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) Act, 1955, with a new framework for governing Hyderabad’s core urban region.
The Bill seeks to bring the three municipal corporations and various agencies operating in the region under a coordinated governance framework, with greater focus on integrated planning and delivery of civic and infrastructure services.
A key provision concerns property tax, with the existing Annual Rental Value (ARV) system to be replaced by the Capital Value System (CVS). Before passage of the Bill, the government amended the transition provision to limit the annual increase in property tax to 10% of the tax payable in the preceding year, against the 20% proposed in the draft.
The increase will be applied annually until the benchmark property tax is reached, after which the property will move fully to the new capital value system from the following financial year.
IT and Industries Minister D Sridhar Babu said apprehensions over an abnormal rise in property tax were unfounded. He said the ARV system was currently followed within GHMC limits, while the CVS was already in force elsewhere in the state, and the Bill sought to establish a uniform capital value-based system.
Under the new system, property tax will be levied at 0.15% of the capital value for residential buildings and 0.75% for non-residential buildings. Sridhar Babu said the annual tax on a 375 sq ft structure occupied by a poor household would be around `101.
The minister said the new framework was needed to meet the requirements of a rapidly expanding metropolitan region. The CURE area, comprising the Greater Hyderabad, Cyberabad and Malkajgiri municipal corporations, has grown to nearly 1.3 crore people, more than 12 times the population for which the 1955 legislation was framed.
The Bill seeks to address problems arising from fragmented administration and overlapping jurisdictions, particularly in areas such as traffic, roads, drainage and urban flooding, water, waste management, lakes and environmental protection.
It provides for coordinated functioning of civic bodies and specialised agencies, while retaining decentralised administration at the ward level. Among the reforms are digital building permissions with deemed approvals, a single services portal, integrated billing and a unified trade licence.
The Bill also provides for a civil penalty system and mechanisms for coordinated action on issues including traffic and road safety, lake protection, climate action, heritage conservation and urban livelihoods.
Sridhar Babu said the draft Bill had received 4,107 suggestions and objections online, following which 70 changes were made before it was introduced in the Assembly.
He said the GHMC Act contained several obsolete provisions and references to laws that had since been repealed. Illustrating how outdated the legislation had become, he noted that it still listed smallpox, eradicated in 1980, as an infectious disease.