The Greater Visakhapatnam Municipal Corporation (GVMC) wants to mop up its property tax, including the vacant land tax, collection to ₹400 crore in the ongoing financial year.
The tax flow took a beating due to the then highly prevailing Covid-19 pandemic in 2019-20 and 2020-21. The GVMC, for the first time, realised over ₹300 crore in the 2021-22. The GVMC wants to further boost its revenue collections this year.
The GVMC collected ₹324 crore property tax in 2021-22 financial year. This was the highest ever annual revenue realised by the Vizag civic body in taxes. The collectible demand for the 2021-22 financial year was ₹340 crore. On the other hand, the GVMC ended the same financial year with ₹186 crore water tax collection – the highest in the last three years.
GVMC commissioner P Raja Babu said that the GVMC is reviewing its revenue flows on a daily basis. “The GVMC cannot take up or plan for any developmental works without meeting its revenue targets. Recently, the GVMC realised ₹1 crore from a private party after the civic body issued notices. We have also concentrated on raising more funds through the corporate social responsibility route. An exercise will be conducted to assess whether there is a proportionate contribution on the part of corporates instead of the GVMC randomly receiving some CSR funds. Some organisations have long pending property tax dues. We will intensively follow up with these organisations to improve our collections,” said Raja Babu.
The GVMC has been levying property tax based on the market price of the property since 2021-22 as against the earlier method of calculating tax based on the rental value of the property. This means, whenever the property prices are revised by the government, the property taxes will correspondingly go northwards.
However, the annual hike of property tax has been capped at a maximum of 15%. The GVMC worked on planning and execution of this new tax system for almost six to seven months before its rollout in 2021. The entire property tax database has been revised according to the new system.