Designing Geographic Information System Based Property Tax Assessment in India

Abstract

Property tax is the primary source of revenue for municipal bodies. In India, municipal corporations are facing issues in property tax collection, and the primary reason for it is a lack of count of assessed properties under its jurisdiction. Also, the storage of information on the properties is mainly based on manual efforts, which leads to data redundancy and failure to appropriate tax collection. Geographical Information Systems (GIS) consists of technology, personnel, and resources to create, maintain, visualize, search, and share geospatial data and services. The study has been carried out in the Hauz Khas Ward, South Delhi Municipal Corporation, Delhi. This paper aims to develop a spatial database for property tax management. It includes capturing the building footprint, road, land use such as parks, paved area, drains, and demarcation of boundaries such as locality slums, based on a regular grid net with a cell size of 250 m by 250 m. The generated geospatial database has been finally used to evaluate parameters for property tax calculation. Moreover, this spatial database can be organized as different models for any web-based application for municipal services. This study provides a working example of a GIS-based property tax collection solution for whole of India and other South-Asian countries.