Bengaluru: The BBMP , which recently attempted to revise tax zones and hike property tax in the face of public opposition to fill its coffers, has admitted it has been lax in collecting the property tax already due to it last year. Worse, many of its officers seem to have no clue about the number of properties in their jurisdiction, making the whole exercise of property tax collection farcical.
Civic activist, Mahalakshmi Parthasarthy, who demanded to know the number of residential and commercial properties in the city’s 198 wards in an RTI application to the BBMP, received replies from only seven wards, including Ulsoor, Bharatinagar and Shivajinagar. Other Assistant Revenue Officers (AROs) of wards refused to respond to her query on one pretext or the other. Many even claimed they were not aware about the number of properties in their jurisdiction!
Going by the response received, the property tax collection in Banaswadi and Marutiseva Nagar wards was just a little over 65 per cent last year. Of the 8,696 residential properties in Banswadi, tax was collected from only 6,500 and in Marutiseva Nagar, only 4,968 of the 7,034 property owners paid their tax, The BBMP admitted that tax collection was low in Kamanahalli and Lingarajapuram wards as well.
“It’s sad that the BBMP does not have centralised information on the number of properties in the city and how much tax they are paying.
Instead of increasing the tax rates or revising zones, why is it not aiming at 100 per cent tax collection? Why this negligence?” asked Ms Parthasarathy.
BBMP Tax and Finance Committee chairman, M. Shivaraju, when contacted, however, said 16.5 lakh properties , both residential and commercial, were already in the tax net in the city. But admitted that five lakh other properties were still not paying tax as they should be. “The problem is not in the core areas, but in the revenue pockets and the periphery of the city,” he explained, adding that as the CC code mapping of the wards was almost complete, the BBMP was now roughly aware of how many properties there were in each. “Very soon we will know how much revenue a zone is capable of earning,” he said.
