There will be no unassessed property in Kolkata after a year, mayor Firhad Hakim said in the civic house on Tuesday.
Hakim had earlier said the Kolkata Municipal Corporation had embarked on a task to assess all properties in the city, but this was the first time he set a deadline for the work.
Unassessed properties are ones about which the KMC has no information. These include vacant plots, ponds and even built structures.
“I want to tell this house that there will be no unassessed property in Kolkata after a year,” Hakim said during a discussion on the KMC budget.
Hakim’s announcement came after a BJP councillor questioned whether the KMC had done enough to raise revenue from property tax.
The revised estimate for the KMC’s property tax collection during the 2022-23 fiscal is Rs 1,158.06 crore.
The intitial estimate for the 2023-24 fiscal is Rs 1,400 crore. The KMC loses revenues if a property remains unassessed, said a KMC official.
A property that was recently purchased but whose mutation has not been done falls in the category of unassessed properties.
All councillors were handed a letter of appeal from the mayor on Friday, when the budget was tabled in the civic house, that urged them to help KMC officials arrange camps in housing complexes for mutation and other property tax related issues.
Unassessed properties are a headache for the KMC for other reasons, too.
Many vacant plots that remain unassessed turn into mosquito breeding grounds. In the absence of any detail about the owner, the KMC cannot serve notice to anyone to clean the plot.
