The genuine tax payers, who pay before April-end, are all set to lose the 2% prompt advance payment rebate
Nagpur: With the Nagpur Municipal Corporation’s Property Tax website being upgraded, the property owners trying to pay tax online for this financial year are unable to do so. The website is giving teething troubles again, leaving the users high and dry. Though people are willing to pay their annual taxes well in time, it seems that the NMC website is not yet ready for accepting the much needed revenue which is the mainstay of the civic body.
Gold Rate
3 May 2025
According to reports, nearly a month into the current financial year, the property tax department is yet to start generating new tax invoices. This also means that genuine tax payers, who pay before April-end, are all set to lose the 2% prompt advance payment rebate that they used to get. With the prevailing heatwave, many citizens are opting for digital ways of transactions and in case of Property Tax the trend is picking-up slowly. There are many citizens who are prompt in making payment of Property Tax. However, for the first two weeks, whenever one clicked on the property tax option on the NMC site there was no response. Thereafter, though the site started working but only to remain inaccessible for the last few days, again leaving citizens furious.
Reports further said that the system upgrade has started with NMC shifting its system to geo-fencing (an application which maps boundaries by using GIS data, so only authorized persons can access the fence). This is to help the civic body prevent any manipulation in the tax system. For this purpose, NMC ended collaboration with Mass Telecom System and assigned Cybertech Systems and Software Limited to generate tax invoices. Though the firm has no knowledge of this work, NMC is promoting the firm as it has been working with NMC for revaluation and assessment of new properties.
On one hand, NMC cries over non compliance of citizens in paying due taxes, on the other hand, the senior officials are not aware of glitches in their own system or tend to look the other way even if they are aware of the issues. Also a look at some of the calculations uploaded on site reveals severe assessment issues. In many cases the area of households has been inflated that results in higher taxable rate for the property owners. So those having issues would need to submit objections in writing and wait for the system to correct the entries.
Another discrepancy that is noticed is that while names of new property owners are mentioned on tax demand notice, when one clicks ‘View Form’ one is foxed as the name of the old owner is mentioned in it leaving citizens in the dock. Same problem is also in Register, where the names of new owners have not been incorporated. Similarly though there is mention of old tax receipts but on clicking the same nothing happens. Had this option been functional, citizens would have been spared the trouble of searching their own records to whip out old tax paid receipts. This is so every year, the Property Tax Department tends to mention the penalty in tax demand notices, even though sometimes people might have paid well in advance.
Sources said NMC feels that only one firm should be ideally handling the tax related services. The new geo-fencing system will help the civic body prevent manipulations in the tax system. In the earlier method, any person having user ID and password could easily access and tamper with the tax amount. But the new system will allow only authorised persons to access the system, said sources.
NMC had hired Cybertech in 2016 for the revaluation of properties and also assessed new properties along with those not in the tax net. The firm helped increase the number of properties and this consequently increased the disputes, as property tax of many properties increased manifold. The earlier firm had transferred the taxpayers’ data but did not share the tax calculation application. As a result, Cybertech is facing hardship in showing past records of taxpayers, which included previous and advance tax payment receipts on its portal.
Sources said until 2021 NMC had started distributing tax invoices by April 15. But this year, it is yet to start the process. It remains unclear why NMC did not make efforts to inform the public about the issue.
