PONDICHERRY: It will take another two to three months for the municipalities to complete the process of assessing number of houses coming under the property tax net.

The review process, after a gap of 21 years, began on February 4 and scheduled to be completed in three to four month's time. Due to lack of technical assistance, the process is getting delayed.

The Pondicherry and Oulgaret Municipalities needed around130 technical assistance for the smooth and speedy conduct of the review.

With not much response for the part time job, the municipalities have to depend on the workers from civil engineering wing to undertake the work. Now the actual number of workers on the field doing the work is just about 40.

"At the beginning, students from the Pondicherry Engineering College and Polytechnic offered to work but then they backed out. Now we have only about15 technical assistance going to the field on a regular basis", G. Malar Kannan, Commissioner of Pondicherry Municipality, told The Hindu .

"Our actual requirement was 84 technical assistance but now we have only around 24 of them doing the assessment process. We are now planning to approach ITI students," said T. Diagarajan, Commissioner of Oulgaret Municipality.

More than four months after the process started, the Pondicherry Municipality could only cover 17,000 buildings out of the 40,000 in its territory.

At present the Pondicherry Municipality have 12,000 buildings, which are under the property tax net. The annual income is around Rs 1.34 crore. After the ongoing review the tax collection is expected to increase.

The Oulgaret Municipality has so far covered 18,650 buildings out of the 52,000 buildings under its jurisdiction. It was collecting property tax from 12,500 houses and made revenue of Rs 3 crore. Officials said that since the property tax assessment under the new review has abandoned the earlier tax calculation based on the rental value of building, some of the building owners have to pay more tax and some of them less than what they were paying.

The new tax assessment is worked out on the basis of type of building, location and usage of the building. One noticeable trend in the new assessment is that owners occupying residential property have come down, said Mr. Malar Kannan.

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Other States

News: Front Page | National | Tamil Nadu | Andhra Pradesh | Karnataka | Kerala | New Delhi | Other States | International | Opinion | Business | Sport | Miscellaneous | Engagements |
Advts: Classifieds | Employment | Updates: Breaking News |