BENGALURU: Without much fuss, the Bangalore Development Authority’s online collection of property tax finally became operational on Wednesday evening. Within 24 hours of its launch, 757 flat and site owners paid at least Rs 30 lakh to the authority.
BDA had announced that it would go online from May 1 but could not meet the deadline due to various reasons. While both offline and online payments of property tax were accepted during the previous financial year, only online payment will be accepted by BDA for 2018-2019.
BDA systems manager K Chethan told The New Indian Express, “We began the online payment system on May 15. By Thursday evening, we had collected Rs 30,31,687 lakh. There were 24 failed transactions too."
Before going live, BDA did a trial run from 8am till 4pm on Wednesday. We had sent SMSes in the morning to nearly 17,000 property owners whose details were available in our database as they had made online payment last year. "By the end of Wednesday, Rs 4.34 lakh had been paid by 90 BDA property owners," he said.
This financial year, BDA aims to collect property tax to the tune of Rs 48.1 crore from 85,719 properties owners, including Kempe Gowda Phase-II allottees who have been newly added to the list. Arkavathy property owners, however, have been left out of the online payment system due to numerous property litigations.
Chethan added, "For the first time ever, BDA collected at least Rs 25 lakh within 24 hours. It was almost as if many are eagerly waiting to pay their taxes."
On the reasons for the delayed launch, he said that a good number of BDA and bank officials had been deputed for election-related duty. “Banks took some time to send us details on the payments made to them by owners in the previous financial year. Unless all previous details are available, we cannot make an assessment of property taxes to be paid,” he said.
If you want to pay your property tax online, you can either visit https://propertytax.bdabangalore.org or bdabangalore.org.