The State government is actively considering deployment of drones to leverage the advantages they offer in cadastral activities and enhance efficiency in property tax collection.
The Socio Economic Outlook 2022 said drones can improve property tax collection in urban areas circumventing commonly faced issues in the domain. While property taxes are a promising source of revenue for local governments, they are associated with large administrative burdens. Collecting property tax entails maintaining and updating spatially complete databases of property records. “Failure to deal with these challenges reduces the potential revenue from property taxes,” the report said.
Drones could however significantly reduce the hurdles to maintaining and updating the maps in urban areas. They would provide low cost solution to surveying techniques and could supplement date on land use with detailed information on the size, capacity and use cases of different buildings in the city. “Consequently, local governments can leverage this data to improve their property tax collections considerably,” the SEO said adding pilots to assess the costs and benefits of using drones in property tax collection had been launched in Bangalore and Hyderabad.
Recognising the potential of drones, the government released the Telangana State Drone Policy in 2019 with a stated goal to strike a balance between regulation and growth-enhancing potential of drones for Telangana.
The SEO quoted the experience of Raipur Municipal Corporation in this regard and said the number of assessed properties increased 1.5 times and total property tax demand jumped from Rs. 83 crore to Rs. 139 crore. The report said over 47 per cent of the State’s population was expected to be living in urban areas as of now and more residents would be living in urban areas in the coming five years.
The future of urban development in the State was full of opportunities with a perfect ecosystem in place for experimenting with new technologies and policy proposals. Several economists recently endorsed the idea of creating an urban employment guarantee scheme and using the person days generated under it to rejuvenate the urban public spaces.
On the technology front, experiences of municipalities like Raipur and larger municipal corporations like Bengaluru show the immense potential of Geographic Information Systems in improving property tax collections. Use the smart traffic management systems to reduce road congestion and on-demand services to improve urban mobility were areas with ample potential for exploration, the repot said.
The State’s IT-hubs and technologists were well suited to act as pioneers in deploying meaningful technologies to improve urban experience and the citizen-centric focus of urban development in the State was poised for a future of greater and more inclusive urbanisation.
