Bengaluru: At the beginning of every financial year BBMP officials set ambitious targets for property tax collection, which also happens to be their major source of income, but they never come anywhere near it.
For the past few years the magical number has been Rs 2,000 crore, but it has so far proved elusive.
While new properties continue to be built every passing day tax collection, tax collection has not kept pace with it.
A top BBMP official said, "We have been doing our best to improve property tax collection. We introduced total station survey with the aim to find out wrong declarations in property by huge complexes and IT parks.”
We accept that the property tax collection is not crossing Rs 2,000 cr. But compared to the previous years we have been improving, the official said.
"We aimed to collect Rs 2,300 crore for the year 2016-17 and ended up collecting Rs 1,463. For 2017-18, we aimed Rs 2,600 crore and managed to collect Rs 1,702 crore," he added.
Total station survey which was introduced in 2017 under the tenure of Gunashekar, the then chairman of standing committee on taxation and finance, identified 80 high rise buildings and tech parks which had under assessed their properties and aimed to collect Rs 500 crore from them, he said and accepted that nothing big was collected from them.
But in the second phase of total station survey we are gearing up to find more defaulters and ensure that they pay up the property tax for the entire property, he assured.
This apart, we are pinning all hopes on the satellite data on all properties in the city to be shared with BBMP by ISRO, the BBMP official said. In the tie up with ISRO, BBMP will be getting satellite images of the properties with the help of which the BBMP officials can cross verify on the property tax paid and the extent of the properties not being declared.
