North and south Delhi civic bodies miss date to issue unique property IDs

The North and South civic bodies have failed in their efforts to bring all properties in their respective jurisdiction under tax net. Both the civic agencies — North Delhi Municipal Corporation (NDMC) and South Delhi Municipal Corporation (SDMC) — have breached the deadlines for conducting door-to-door survey of properties and issue them unique property identification card (UPIC).

During a standing committee meeting last week, a North Corporation official said that they will need at least two months more to bring all residential and commercial properties under the tax net. The NDMC had started the project aimed to increase tax collection in January 2015. It includes compiling record of all properties, geo-tagging, and issuing them UPIC. All these works were supposed to be done by August 31.

Each card costs Rs 204 to the civic agency.

The issue of delay in the project was raised by councillors of Aam Aadmi Pary (AAP)-led opposition in the standing committee meeting. The councillors said that the project has turned out to be a complete ‘failure’ as till date cards have been issued to only 5.32 lakh property owners out of targeted 12 lakh. Also, these numbers included thousands of properties in slum clusters, which are not liable to pay property tax, they claimed.

Vikas Goel, AAP councillor from Wazirpur, said, “Instead of focussing on properties in posh neighbourhoods, the company assigned for the job focussed on slum and resettlement colonies. They have surveyed 12,000 colonies and issued them UPIC cards unnecessarily.”

“Moreover, the project has barely helped increase the number of taxpayers. The total number of taxpayers in 2014-15, when the project was launched, were 3.7 lakh and in 2017-18, the number went up to just 4 lakhs,” said Anil Lakra, leader of opposition, North Corporation.

However, North Corporation spokesperson YS Mann said, “Under section 120 A of DMC Act, any property in municipal corporation’s jurisdiction is bound to pay tax. That’s why we focussed on rehabilitation colonies with an aim to update our records.”

NDMC officials denied these allegations. “We have received 5,589 complaints and of them, 3,256 have been sorted out. In such a huge survey, some errors are bound to happen,” said a senior NDMC official.

The SDMC, which started the survey in September 2017, has also failed to meet deadline of June 2018. According to an estimate, there are 12 lakh properties that fall under the SDMC jurisdiction, which are liable to pay property tax.

“In 2017-18, the SDMC had 4.44 lakh taxpayers. During the door-to-door campaign, we collected at least six lakh forms over the past 10 months. After verifying nearly two lakh forms, we have identified 20,000 new taxpayers,” said a senior SDMC official.