The Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike has mopped up close to Rs 1,450 crore as property tax in the first four months of the current fiscal giving a big relief to the financially ailing civic agency.
Sources in the Palike said Rs 1,254 crore has been collected at the Palike head office, tax collection centres at ward level, online payment and the BangaloreOne centres. The rest has been paid through cheques, whose details have not been fed in Palike's intranet system.
Palike Administrator T M Vijay Bhaskar has credited intensive tax collection drive for the performance . He believed that the Palike would achieve the target for the current fiscal.
“We have set a target of Rs 2,450 crore which we are pretty sure to achieve by the end of this financial year,” said Vijay Bhaskar.
Previous year, Chief Minister Siddaramaiah had given a target of Rs 2,900 crore to the BBMP but only Rs 1,710 crore could be collected. This year, however, the Palike has reached close to last year's tax collection. The confidence to reach tax collection close to Rs 2,500 crore is mainly due to the fact that there are more than 1.8 lakh huge properties in the City, which have not come under the tax net so far.
Deputy Commissioner of BBMP revenue department, M Venkatachalapathy said, “So far 16.75 lakh properties have been identified in the City using the Geographical Information System (GIS) of which 1.8 lakh properties are still out of the tax purview. We are striving to bring them under the tax net this year itself.”
Another Palike officer said the properties out of tax purview are those which are under litigation - either over ownership or the over dimensions. There are some tax defaulters, who could be high and mighty and prefer remaining out of tax net.
“We are seriously tackling the third category. They are the real big defaulters as the dimension of their properties is quite big,” said the officer requesting anonymity.