The Municipal Administration Department of Telangana, which has successfully used satellite-based data to prepare a property database for 73 Urban Local Bodies (ULBs), has attracted the Centre’s attention.
The Department of Administrative Reforms & Public Grievances of the Central government has sought a detailed up-to-date report on ‘Property mapping in ULBs of Telangana’ along with 10 ‘good quality photographs’ for publication of a coffee table book.
In a communication to Director of Municipal Administration T.K. Sreedevi, Director in DAR&PG department Alpana Shukla Rao has stated that the coffee table book will be containing important highlights and details of innovations submitted for the Prime Minister’s Award in the ‘innovation category’.
Property mapping project was earlier sent to the Central department to be considered for the PM’s Award and Ms. Rao had informed that the ‘success story’ has been short-listed for publication.
Details digitised
Under the State government project, property records with registration data giving information of encumbrance, prohibited and disputed properties were all digitised.
In partnership with National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC) information was integrated spatially by geo-tagging each property by the DMA.
Mobile app
A user-friendly mobile application and server based solution was developed to enable data collector to record assets with spatial position — longitude, latitude and attribute the status, stamped with time and geo-tagged photographs.
“Each bill collector was designated an area where GPS is synched with assessment data and photo of the front and side of the property from a distance of 10 metres is taken. The data is uploaded to the revenue officer of ULB for approval. We have mapped 12.5 lakh properties in the 72 municipalities in this fashion,” explained Ms. Sreedevi.
Easy access
Geo-tagged properties were tagged to the tax database containing details of the owner, tax details, building, encumbrance, etc., so that any citizen can access the database through the ULB website of cdma.telangana.gov.in using the property tax assessment number or house number.
“Our own team did the work and no extra expenditure was involved in the entire process which would otherwise cost us ₹50 lakh per property. It had helped us detect variation of nearly 42% in tax base enabling us to get more revenue of ₹31 crore from unassessed 20,100 properties and underassessed 4.83 lakh properties without revising the tax rate,” she added.
