Assam: Guwahati Municipal Corporation sets January 1 deadline for property tax defaulters

The Guwahati Municipal Corporation (GMC) has tied up with Assam Power Distribution Company Limited (APDCL) to extract pending property tax amounting up to Rs 250 crore and has set January 1 as a deadline for defaulters.

GMC is unable to recover the pending property tax of Rs 250 crore from the over two lakh residents withholding numbers, so it has delegated to the public the responsibility of conducting property assessments and connecting property holding numbers to electricity consumer numbers.

Notably, the technique has been used to weed out tax defaulters as GMC has incurred loss in revenue collection for years.

''The civic organization has been suffering a significant loss in revenue collection for years and has therefore adopted a user-friendly platform that enables the citizens to evaluate their properties, create holding numbers, if they do not already have them, and pay their debts,'' said GMC mayor, Mrigen Sarania.

He also acknowledged that the self-service approach was implemented because the GMC lacked the manpower to assess and collect outstanding debt in all 60 wards.

In order to prevent energy disconnection, the municipality has requested residents to pay outstanding property taxes by January 1; to do this, the civic body has partnered with Assam Power Distribution Company Limited (APDCL).

Over 3 lakh electrical subscribers, of whom over 2 lakh have property ownership numbers, are located within the jurisdiction of the local body, according to statistics provided by GMC. 

The GMC representative said that the remaining electrical users had never paid property taxes because they have no property holding number. In addition, only about 83,000 of the more than two lakh households with property holding numbers paid the taxes in the previous year, and the rest haven't.