As of March 31, Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC)'s property tax revenue for 2023-24 stood at INR 3,147 crore. This is the lowest tax collection in the past eight years.
The dip in collection is attributed to delayed bill delivery, legal issues, and a freeze on tax increases for the past five years.
Despite the challenges, BMC aimed to collect at least 70% of the income by March 31. For this, BMC extended the payment deadline to May 25 without any late fee. Another reason is that the taxpayers received the bills only on February 27. This means that the department in charge of assessment and collection only had a month to gather the money.
To meet the collection goal, BMC published a list of major defaulters. The civic body was able to collect INR 3,147 crores in property tax in a month because of this. But the fiscal year 2023–24 will show an INR 1,300 crore gap. The new fiscal year will include the money collected as of April 1st.
Over the past four days, taxpayers have had access to the facilitation centres located at BMC headquarters and 24 administrative wards. They were continuously functioning from 8 am to 10 pm.
Property tax was once a major source of income for BMC. But it has seen a decline in recent years. The bills are usually sent out by July of each fiscal year. In December 2023, the bills were sent with a 20% increase. However, following public criticism, BMC retracted the bills and sent new ones without an increase.
BMC now expects to collect about INR 5,500 crore from development plan fees and premiums, surpassing the expected property tax revenue of INR 4,500 crore. For the fiscal year 2024–25, BMC projects property taxes to bring in INR 4,950 crore and development plan fees to bring in INR 5,800 crore.
Till the previous year, BMC's second-largest source of revenue was compensation from the state government for the taxes.
But this year, the collections might be lower than during the epidemic years 2020 and 2021. This was when BMC did not impose strict penalties on defaulters.
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