HYDERABAD: In a bid to mop up more revenue through property tax from the unassessed and under-assessed properties in commercial areas, the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) will take up a two-dimension (2D) Geographic Information Systems (GIS) survey from the second week of November. The exercise will be completed by the end of December.
Through the 2D GIS survey, the GHMC is expected to generate additional revenue of Rs 150-Rs 200 crore. In the first phase, the teams will survey one-third (120) of the 340 property-wise dockets mapped by the corporation. The survey will primarily be centred around three GHMC zones — Serilingampally, LB Nagar and Kukatpally — as a lot of construction activities take place here.
The GHMC officials told Express that all zonal commissioners, deputy municipal commissioners and assistant municipal commissioners were imparted training on how to conduct the 2D GIS survey in the last two days. A mobile tablet with docket-wise details has been provided to each of them. According to the officials, the 2D GIS survey was proposed because the corporation found a lot of mismatches in the collection process. In fact, in the data collected, many commercial buildings have been wrongly registered as residential in use. This has caused a huge revenue loss to the GHMC.
“The corporation wants to rectify all these defects with this hitech survey, and increase the property tax revenues,” officials said. The job of the bill collector here is to check the usage of the building, find out whether it was assessed, inspect if any extra floor has come up without authorisation, and other related data. This information will simultaneously be linked to the head office for further action.
For each area, the team has to complete the inspection in a span of 10 minutes. Per day, they have to inspect at least 60 properties. Priority would be given to commercial properties, as they are the major source of revenue income to the corporation, the officials added.
After collecting the said data, a revised property tax bill will be generated, which will be issued to the property owners. “With this exercise, the GHMC is expected to generate another Rs 200 crore annually from property tax,” another official stated.