Payment of property tax especially for the newly constructed individual houses or new apartments is quite a Herculean task considering the complex method of calculating or assessing the precise amount to be paid.
Property owners are usually at the mercy of the bill collector concerned. Getting the property tax assessed has been especially an excruciating task for properties on city suburbs where gram panchayats that got merged into tiny municipalities have had to deal with multi-storied apartments and gated communities with inadequate staff.
This year, it should be less painful considering that the department of Municipal Administration and Urban Development has initiated an online self-assessment of property tax for both the ‘old’ (73) and newly formed (68) Urban Local Bodies (ULBs).
“Citizens can log onto the system (http://ptnewulbsonlinepay.telangana.gov.in/) and fill in details to get the property tax assessment done for their respective properties online as is mandated under the new municipal Act. We have also put a demo video on how to go about it. Tax assessments can be done manually at the respective municipal offices too,” say senior officials.
To get the tax assessment done online, the property owner better be armed with all the necessary information like the municipality or urban local body where the building or apartment is located, plinth area, building permission details, survey number, registration date and document number and so on.
However, the tricky part could be to get correct information about the estimated land value, date of sanction and completion, etc. Once the details are keyed in like whether it is a commercial or residential property, the system will calculate the tax and enable the citizen to pay the required tax amount online.
“Once the tax is paid, the system will generate the assessment number along with the door number for the property automatically. We have about 8,087 properties assessed in this fashion in the old and newly constituted ULBs,” claim senior officials.
Considering that only Warangal has seen 2,719 self-assessments online followed by Bandangpet at 470 and Palvancha at 202, the online assessment system is yet to become popular.
Director of Municipal Administration T.K. Sreedevi in a recent video-conference pulled up the laggards and instructed the municipal commissioners to update data, monitor the online tax assessment system and generate tax demand notices for properties recently merged into ULBs from the gram panchayats.
