KMC to take up special steps to collect house tax dues in 2019

Kolkata: Come 2019 the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) will take special measures to collect house tax arrears, the total amount of which has reached an astronomical figure of around Rs 4,000 crore.

Deputy Mayor Atin Ghosh, who is in charge of the Assessment department, has proposed to launch a massive movement to collect the property tax dues. He called for involving the councillors who will go to the defaulters and urge them to pay the dues.

KMC can waive 50% of the interest accrued on the principal amount. Ghosh will lead the teams that will visit the houses of errant house owners. Earlier, KMC had put up notices and conducted drives against the defaulters but they failed to yield desired results.

Collection of house tax arrears has become a major problem for KMC. There are habitual defaulters and thousands of cases are lying pending before the Municipal Assessment Tribunal. The house owners not satisfied with the property tax fixed by the civic authorities move to the tribunal and many cases that had been filed nearly a decade ago have not been disposed of yet.

Also, there are houses where it is difficult to trace the original owners. The tenants do not pay the rent and many of them are encroachers. The civic authorities have sent several notices to the house owners who have neither turned up nor sent their representatives.

KMC has proposed to take over these buildings and is taking opinions of legal experts, but this may give rise to several complications.

Earlier, when Subrata Mukherjee was the Mayor (2000-2005) and in the first phase of Sovan Chatterjee as Mayor (2010-15), the state government had introduced the waiver scheme. But the tax arrears collected by KMC was not highly satisfactory.