Imagine if, next year, BBMP were to declare that all those who have been paying property tax regularly need not do so, and all those who have not been paying will have to pay !! While that's wishful, it also points to the scale of the problem - if implemented, this won't make any difference to BBMP's finances, because the number of people avoiding property taxes is roughly the same as those who are paying.
This has been very well known for many years - decades, actually. But there is a joint partnership of all the traditional parties not to disturb the status quo. After all, it makes money for all of them, so they can count on whoever is in power to protect them all.
As a result, lakhs of properties are invisible in plain sight. They get power connections and water supply and on-street parking rights and all sorts of other services and benefits, although in theory they don't exist.
BBMP has an entire IT division to look at all this. But the main job of that division is to hide the data and ensure it never gets out into the public domain. After all, how hard can it be for any competent IT professional, in a city that is full of them, to figure out which properties are tax-paying and which ones are not? Most freshers can do this job in a couple of weeks, but BBMP's IT division has been trying to solve this problem - or so it claims - for 20 years.
That is as far from the truth as you can get. What is really going on is a very diligent effort to shield all the ghost properties from the tax net. And this situation has persisted despite changes of government. JDS, BJP, Congress - such things don't matter to the stable environment of corruption, because they share a common interest.
The day the city votes for politicians who don't have a vested interest in the land and property businesses, that's the day we can expect all of this to change. Until then, we will continue with a city in which half the people pay taxes, and the other half fumes at the unfairness of this.
