• MCC to rope in volunteers for property survey
• To distribute PVC material QR boards to building owners

Mysuru: From tomorrow, the Mysuru City Corporation (MCC) will begin its ambitious project of computing details of each and every property in city and providing Quick Response (QR) code to citizens so that they can pay tax online without coming to  Corporation Offices.

The project was scheduled to begin today itself but it is delayed by a day due to the shortage of QR code stickers. “We are kick-starting this novel initiative from tomorrow  (Dec. 22). Our Corporation will be the first Urban Local Body (ULB) to launch this programme in the country. The official launch of this programme will take place on Jan. 1, 2021,” MCC Commissioner Gurudatta Hegde told Star of Mysore.

The first phase of the project will cover commercial properties and in the second phase, residential properties will be covered. “From tomorrow, our officers will visit commercial outlets and complexes and list out the properties if they are in order after clicking photos. Then the next process will start,”  MCC Deputy Commissioner (Revenue) Kumar Naik said. 

Before giving QR code, the MCC has asked all its Revenue Inspectors to personally visit 20 to 25 percent of those Mysureans who have promptly paid taxes online for the year 2020-21 to collect details of their properties and upload the collected data in specially created mobile application. 

The Survey Officer would collect details about property as total area, number of floors and usage. Pictures of properties from four different angles would be taken on the mobile phone and uploaded to the newly-created application. The purpose of selecting this group of citizens is to enable them to pay tax without any hassles for the year 2021-22. “We will try to complete this section of citizens before Dec. 31, 2020,” the     Commissioner said.

Volunteers’ help

He said that the MCC intends to take the assistance of volunteers in the door-to-door survey. As per the Corporation records, there are 1.70 lakh properties and the number may go up once the actual survey was done. It would be not possible for 60 Revenue Inspectors to survey the whole city. 

The volunteers would be given honorarium and would try to complete the process before March 31, 2021. Firstly, they would survey every single property and store it in data bank for all references. 

The door-to-door survey would also help the MCC to find out tax defaulters, wrongly showing commercial buildings as residential and paying less tax, floor area rule violations, encroachments and other wrongdoings. Owners of such properties could be brought into tax net and also take legal action if violations cannot be regularised. Leakage of property tax could be eliminated completely once they switch over to new system, he noted.

QR board in PVC material

Hegde said the QR code board would be of PVC material as it would prevent damage during rain or burn under the sun as it would be barcoded. The Corporation would distribute PVC material QR code board to every house or a commercial establishment through which the people can scan it with their mobile phone and make payments online. 

Besides, with QR code, citizens could also vote in Swachh Survekshan in judging the cleanest city in different categories. Plans are afoot to put videos on informative subjects like garbage disposal, plastic ban and general reminders for tax payment could be uploaded in it for enabling people to watch it. 

“We are keeping our fingers crossed as it is our ambitious plan to show to the entire nation that ‘We did it’ and streamline property tax payment system from April 1, 2021. We are racing against time as hardly four months are left,” he pointed out.

Other benefits of QR

“Since we do not maintain Demand and Collection Register properly and are not able to calculate the arrears of properties after the end of financial year, the tax collection stands low. With QR code generation, any alteration in the property be it structural or ownership will get reflected in MCC records,” an MCC officer said. 

“Not only tax collection, but once we have digitised records, it will enable Government to link other Government Schemes and transfer of benefits to citizens using the same QR code,” he added.