Ruling out hike in property tax in Bengaluru in the near future, deputy chief minister DK Shivakumar on Monday said the government will roll out a programme, ‘Nanna Swathu’ (My Property), that envisages digitisation of property documents.Under the programme, officials will measure the properties manually to ascertain whether the owners are paying the right amount as tax or declaring lesser property area under the self-assessment scheme. The officials will put out the exact details of the property online to avoid misrepresentations.
While the core objective and working mechanism of ‘Nanna Swathu’ are similar to the existing Urban Property Ownership Records (UPOR) being implemented by the revenue department, Shivakumar said: “There is pilferage happening during tax payment and not everyone is paying taxes. We’ll do a complete survey of properties, digitise records and hand over documents to property owners with instructions to pay tax.” Shivakumar, who was speaking at the Brand Bengaluru conclave, exuded confidence in seeing a three-fold increase in property tax collection.
Currently, BBMP is collecting around Rs 3,000 crore per year. “This is shameful, we can collect more. We’ll set up a new team to work on this,” he added.
The government will also reboot the automatic building plan approval scheme which was mooted in 2018.
Shivakumar said non-political committees, comprising local residents and nodal officers appointed by BBMP, will be set up for development of parks and playgrounds.
“They will monitor and prevent encroachments. The committees may get corporate social responsibility (CSR) funds to develop parks and playgrounds,” he said, adding that he will launch a website— ‘Sahayahastha’—to address ward-level problems of the public.