GHMC to club tax, building plan approval

To curb irregularities in property tax assessment, Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) is working on integrating property tax details with the building plan approval process.

Accordingly, once an occupancy certificate is issued, owner of the building will be able to access the property tax details immediately, doing away with human intervention in assessment.

This facility will be applicable for structures, which get occupancy certificates. For those which are constructed in less than 200 square metres area, occupancy certificate is not issued and assessment is done manually.

Under the present practice, after an occupancy certificate is issued for a building, the GHMC officials in the respective circle inspect the building and assess the same. This is followed by a property tax demand notice.

However, GHMC authorities have noticed a few discrepancies in assessment and in an effort to arrest the irregularities, are now working on integrating the property tax details with building plan



approval.

Every year, the GHMC issues nearly 6,000 occupancy certificates. Once the integration was completed, manual inspection would not be required as the entire structure details would be available under the Development Permission Management System. Soon after the building plan details were entered, the system would generate the property tax, said a senior official from GHMC.

The system will be generating property tax details for each flat in an apartment and individual house as well. For commercial establishments, authorities are working out modalities, as assessment is done covering entire floor area and tax component has to be determined for each shop in the floor.

All these issues are being studied and the software will be upgraded after fixing such issues. A special team of technicians from Pune and senior authorities from IT wing are working on upgrading the software. Efforts were onto complete the exercise in two months and introduce the new facility, he added.