The Hindu : Kerala / Thiruvananthapuram News : Land ownership rights for flat owners mooted

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Dec 03, 2007
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Kerala

Kerala - Thiruvananthapuram

Land ownership rights for flat owners mooted

Staff Reporter

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The State government is considering a proposal to give land ownership rights to all flat owners in residential apartments and to introduce slab system of taxes for them.

Revenue Minister K.P. Rajendran told The Hindu here recently that the ownership of land housing the high-rise apartments was now vested with the builders or the contractors. Only in some select cases, the flat owners had joint ownership with the occupants. As per the present laws, only the owners have to pay the land tax.

The new proposal is to give distributed ownership to all the flat owners and collect land tax from all of them individually for the entire area occupied by the flat complex, including the common area. The tax rates will depend on the area of their flats.

Slab system

Mr Rajendran said the proposal to introduce slab system of taxes for flats and apartments had been mooted as part of the Government’s efforts to discourage the construction of luxury apartments. Construction of luxury apartments imposes severe cost escalation in the construction sector. Now the proposal is to introduce differential rates of building tax with very huge rates for luxury apartments. We cannot ban the construction of such huge apartments, and this is the only way we can discourage them. At the same time the people with small houses can be spared from tax hike, the Minister said. The official said there was also a proposal for slab system for land tax in other forms of lands also. The poorer sections will of course be spared from the hike while massive rates should be imposed on large holdings. Similarly paddy farms are also to be exempted from the purview of tax hike, as an incentive to promote paddy cultivation.

According to officials, marginal holdings with less than 1 hectare constituted around 54 per cent of the total land area, and among private holdings those of more than five cents and less than 250 cents constitutes the lion share of land holdings.

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