Pune civic body tags just 12,000 new properties through GIS in 1 year

PMC has started the tagging of unassessed and unauthorised properties and change-of-use properties across the city, along with the GIS mappingSiddharth Gadkari | Pune Mirror | October 31, 2017, 16:30 IST

It has been more than a year that the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) employed geographic information system (GIS) to map properties across the city. Till now, it has only been able to find out 12,000 new constructions out of four lakh surveyed properties, to be able to look into alterations, new constructions, defaulters and so on.

Satyavan Mungshe, who is handling the GIS method, told Mirror, “We have found around 12,000 new properties, while 7,700 others have made alteration to the original ones. We have sent notices to new property tax holders this year.”

PMC has started the tagging of unassessed and unauthorised properties and change-of-use properties across the city, along with the GIS mapping. The survey began from November 2016 and its contract includes verifying the existing size of properties, mentioning data of property owners (name, mobile, e-mail address), clicking photographs of properties and their documents, mentioning their longitude and altitude, their building permissions among other things.

The civic body has been expecting to find lakhs of new properties in the tax department’s ambit through this method. Revenue of Rs 200 crore was expected through the additional findings, which seems distant with the mere 12,000 spottings. This prompted deputy mayor Siddharth Dhere to deem the GIS method as a “waste.” He said, “We had taken objection earlier but the objection did not listen. If the corporation has found such small amount of properties, it is nothing but waste of money.”

Maximum of these four lakh properties were found in PMC’s Zone-IV which covers Dhankwadi, Bibavewadi, Kondwa-Wanowrie and Hadapsar. Zone-II, which included Nagar Road, Yerwada, Sangamwadi, Dhole Patil Road, followed the suit with 85,347 findings.

The work was assigned to private players who quoted Rs 300 for tagging of every property. The standing committee had ended up sanctioning Rs 22.90 crore for the entire mapping process as through GIS they expected to tag illegal constructions, encroachments on open public, government or private lands. The administration can also keep track of the status of amenity spaces. Currently, around 400 people are conducting the survey in the city.

It was supposed to help the civic body also tag those residential properties, which are used for commercial purposed. Often, it has stumbled across such elements misusing residential properties, as they have to pay lesser tax compared to commercial ones.

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