NAGPUR: A recent land use verification exercise by the Nagpur Municipal Corporation’s (NMC) Development Plan (DP) unit has uncovered 30,000 previously unrecorded structures within city limits. This finding raises significant concerns regarding tax evasion and the reliability of civic data.
The DP unit identified these structures while assessing existing land usage as part of its urban planning responsibilities. In response, the NMC’s property tax department has begun a thorough cross-verification of the information. Officials intend to overlay the new discoveries onto the corporation’s existing GIS (Geographical Information System) property database to pinpoint properties that are not currently subject to tax.
A senior official from the property tax department told TOI, “The DP team has surveyed and outlined areas for the structures that are not currently included in our system. These may comprise buildings built on plots that were previously listed as empty, and we might have been taxing them solely based on their open plot status.”
He further explained that the property tax department will now superimpose the newly outlined areas from the DP survey onto the GIS database, enabling them to check against existing tax records. “This process will help us identify any unauthorized constructions or unassessed properties that might have been overlooked. It’s likely that the updated data will encompass new buildings erected in the past few years that were never officially documented,” he added.
Currently, the NMC collects taxes on approximately 6.37 lakh properties. However, if these 30,000 newly identified units are valid and taxable, the actual number of constructed properties could be significantly higher.
Tax officials acknowledged that in many instances, building permits are either delayed or not reported to the tax department, resulting in discrepancies between actual constructions and tax assessments. The ongoing integration of the DP’s updated land use records with the GIS-based taxation system is anticipated to rectify this issue.
NMC officials confirmed that once the GIS overlay is finalized, a verification process will be conducted to assess the physical status of each new property. Depending on the findings, the civic body may issue new assessment notices to bring these properties into the tax system, which could considerably enhance municipal revenue.
