‘Tax, roads and Charminar’

Focus of the GHMC this season

S K Joshi and Adhar Sinha, Principal Secretaries, M T Krishna Babu, Commissioner, GHMC along with all the Additional Commissioners of the GHMC held a review meeting on Friday, to assess the progress of the activities that have been taken up by the civic body. The Principal Secretaries have directed all the field level functionaries who are utilising the services of Off Site Real Time (OSRT) to capture all the functions of the GHMC and upload the information onto the GHMC portal irrespective of the concerned department. They said that this practice would inculcate accountability amongst the officials.

They have also resolved on settling issues like, recovery of service tax from the Railways and other government departments. They also said that they would ask for speedy release of the funds that were promised by the government. The Principal Secretaries have directed the officials to bring each and every property under the tax net by using the services of the various functionaries they have deployed. They also said that there is a need for a reassessment of properties as the Self Declaration and Self Assessment of property laws were passed 15 years ago. They also directed the Commissioner to take up the Charminar Pedestrianisation Project immediately as it has already been delayed.

The Principal Secretaries opined that there should be one integrated tribunal to sort out the various issues of GHMC instead of having one for each subject. They suggested that there be an identified list of all the stagnation points and badly damaged roads. They said that the GHMC should take up such maintenance works before the onset of monsoon every year.
The Commissioner gave a presentation on the various activities that have been taken up by the GHMC like, Property Tax collection, Door-to-Door garbage collection etc. He further explained that with the existing staff of 330 bill collectors and 50 tax inspectors it has become a Herculean task for them to collect maximum revenue this year. The targets have been set at the rate of 4000 houses per bill collector.

They are also using services of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) to map out the various sources of revenue such as trade licenses, property tax, advertisement tax and professional tax from each building. Till now the GHMC has collected Rs 288.81 crore as compared to Rs 245.52 crores last year. It is rumoured that the meeting was held by the Principal Secretaries to find out what the GHMC had in store. As the centre had decided on bifurcation of the state and Hyderabad was said to be the joint capital for a 10 year period.

Ronald Rose, Additional Commissioner (Planning), R Dhan Singh, Engineer-in-Chief, Additional Commissioners L Vandan Kumar, K Ashok Reddy, D Jayaraj Kennedy, GV Raghu, Chief City Planner took part in the meeting.