GUWAHATI: The Guwahati Municipal Corporation (GMC) is unable to recover the pending property tax of Rs 250 crore from the over two lakh residents withholding numbers, so it has delegated to the general public the responsibility of property assessment and the linking of property holding numbers with electricity consumer numbers. To weed out tax defaulters, this technique has been used.
To prevent electricity disconnection, the GMC has asked residents to pay their back property taxes by January 1; to do this, the civic body has partnered with the Assam Power Distribution Company.
According to the GMC's data, the civic body's jurisdiction includes more than 3 lakh electricity users, more than two lakh of whom are registered as property owners. The remaining electricity users have never paid property taxes because they have no property holding numbers.
In addition, only about 83,000 of the more than two lakh households with property holding numbers paid the taxes in the previous year, and the rest haven't.
Mrigen Sarania, the mayor of the GMC, claimed that the civic body has suffered significant losses in revenue collection for years and has therefore adopted a user-friendly platform that enables the citizens to evaluate their properties, create holding numbers if they do not already have them, and pay their debts.
He acknowledged that the self-service system was implemented because the GMC lacked the manpower to survey and collect outstanding debts from all 60 wards through field visits.
Property tax is one of the GMC's main sources of income, according to sources. Presently, the municipal corporation is home to 1,76,099 property owners. You have the choice of making a payment online, at a GMC office, or at a bank. Property taxes must be paid to GMC by anyone with real estate in the Guwahati Municipal Area.
A portion of the property's assessed value is used to calculate property taxes. The value and location of the property or land are taken into account while calculating property taxes.
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