The Hindu : New Delhi News : MCD launches Saral Form for house tax

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Oct 20, 2004

New Delhi

New Delhi

MCD launches Saral Form for house tax

By Lalit K. Jha

NEW DELHI, OCT. 19. Virtually flooded with complaints from property owners that they were facing "difficulties'' in filling up the 12-page self-assessment form to calculate and submit house tax, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi has prepared a "Saral Form" on the pattern of those of the Income-tax Department.

Developed and designed by the MCD Hardship and Anomalies Committee, the one-page form has been approved by the Municipal Commissioner, Rakesh Mehta, and is likely to be launched in a day or two. Incidentally, the last day for submitting house tax to avail of the rebate is October 31.

"Instead of filling as many as 12 pages, property owners will now have to fill only one page," claimed the Congress Councillor from Janakpuri, Sanjay Puri, who is also the member of the Hardship and Anomalies Committee.

Besides being user-friendly, Mr. Puri claimed the Saral C Form developed after a lot of meticulous planning and research could be read by computers and includes all relevant information required by a property owner to self-assess and calculate his house tax. "It is also an environment-friendly measure. By developing this form, we would be saving a substantial amount of paper, thus preventing the cutting of trees," he said.

With Delhi having an estimated 18-lakh properties, submitting of house tax through the old form would have required at least 2.2-crore pages. "Now with the Saral Form, we would be requiring at the most 20-lakh pages. Given the fact that the civic body is distributing these forms free to the public, MCD would also be saving a lot of money in the process," Mr. Puri added.

Giving details of the new form that would also take less time to fill, Mr. Puri said it also has columns for telephone numbers, e-mails and details of the payment being made. "It has been developed in such a way that in future the same form could be used for on-line payment of house tax through MCD website," he claimed.

Further, the computer readable Saral Form would also assist MCD in generating all the relevant data required on properties across the Capital.

Senior officials in the MCD said the user-friendly form would be given wide publicity in the coming days. "Now people need not rush to the Citizens' Services Bureau to get a copy of the form, which most of the time was not available or was sold at a premium by unscrupulous staff of the civic body,'' they said. "Now people can simply get the form photo-copied and submit at the nearest house tax collection centre."

Mr. Puri said the decision to develop such a form was taken after the Committee received a large number of complaints from property owners that the form was not user-friendly, but was too complicated to fill up. The Saral Form would also be made available on two websites: www.mcdonline.gov.in and www.mcduam.com from where people can download and take a printout.

Further, having signed a memorandum of understanding with Easy Bill, MCD would also announce this week that the residents could deposit their property tax at any of the nearly 500 counters of Easy Bill. These outlets are mostly in neighbourhood markets and are open from 10 a.m. till late in the night as per the timings of the market. Residents can deposit their tax either in cash or kind and can get a receipt from the Easy Bill then and there. Several public utilities like privately managed discoms and cellular operators already have tie-ups with Easy Bill.

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