QUALITY EFFORT: Municipal Commissioner Natarajan Gulzar releasing a brochure on the new property tax system in Vijayawada on Tuesday. — PHOTO: CH. VIJAYA BHASKAR

VIJAYAWADA: The system of self-assessment of property tax, which has been in vogue in Hyderabad for long and which allows owner of a building to declare the total plinth area on his own, will come into operation in the city from June 15.

The facility will be available to all new buildings and old buildings that have either been under-assessed or unassessed.

In a bid to deliver high quality and efficient services to the people, the Vijayawada Municipal Corporation (VMC) will also be introducing from the same date the facility of issuing no-dues certificates and transfer of titles across the counter.

Addressing a press conference on Tuesday, Municipal Commissioner Natarajan Gulzar said people could apply for transfer of titles at the three circle offices of the VMC from Friday onwards.

Titles would be transferred on the spot if there was no necessity to verify the link documents. Until now, a person had to wait for seven days for transfer of the title. In the case of issuing no-dues certificates too, there would be no waiting time.

Mr. Gulzar said self-assessment of properties would be implemented in letter and spirit with the introduction of a simplified self-assessment form, which he unveiled at the press conference. These forms would be available to people at all citizen charter desks in the circle offices or could be downloaded from the corporation's website www.ourvmc.org. Demand notices would be issued within 48 hours of submission of self-assessment forms, and would be despatched to the applicants through courier.

Open defecation

The Commissioner hoped that the reforms would strengthen the circle offices and services rendered by the revenue wing would be streamlined.

On the occasion of completion of one year of the VMC's silver jubilee celebrations on Tuesday, Mr. Gulzar listed out a few achievements and failures in respect of the special campaigns taken up by the corporation.

"I must admit we have failed in our campaign against open defecation. We realised we need to provide individual sanitary latrines to every household or adequate number of public urinals and lavatories before we can take up the campaign," he said.

However, in respect of other campaigns like water supply and formation of resident welfare associations, Mr. Gulzar said the corporation had succeeded as evident in the number of water connections that rose to 71,000 from last year's 56,000.

As many as 10,000 new water connections were given to Below Poverty Line (BPL) families. As many as 212 resident welfare associations had been formed, of which 150 were implementing door-to-door garbage collection, he said.

Deputy Commissioner (revenue) B. Nagendra Kumar was also present.

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