GIS maps will help assess households in municipal areas that evade holding tax. Picture by Deepak Kumar

Patna, July 27: Evading holding tax would soon be a “mission impossible” in Bihar.

Geographic Information System (GIS) maps would spot each house in every urban local body (ULB). To be introduced soon in each urban local body, GIS maps would be used as a tool for assessment of the number of households, city planning and to explore growth possibilities of different cities.

At present, a large number of holdings in urban areas are not paying taxes to the urban local bodies because they have failed to carry out a comprehensive survey of their respective areas to bring the households under the tax net.

According to an estimate, Patna alone has about one lakh such holdings.

The urban local bodies have cited lack of adequate resources as the main reason for failing to conduct comprehensive surveys to bring all the holdings under the tax net.

Bids for selecting the agency that would be assigned the highly technical work have been invited.

The process is likely to be completed in a month, urban development department principal secretary Girish Shanker told The Telegraph.

Shanker said that apart from cities, GIS maps of all the nine divisions of the state would be prepared. These maps would help assess the real number of households in municipal areas, which would help enhance the holding tax collection.

Moreover, the high-resolution GIS maps would also help in identifying areas that lack civic amenities and those could be used for future growth of the cities.

The funds for this work would come from the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID)-funded Support Programme for Urban Development (SPUR).

The DFID would provide £60 million over a period of six years, starting from 2010, for 28 urban local bodies, including those of Patna, Muzaffarpur, Gaya, Darbhanga and Motihari.

While one-sixths of the fund would be in the form of technical assistance, the remaining part would be in the form of financial assistance.

The urban development department principal secretary said SPUR, after implementation, would bring a sea change in the functioning of ULBs because its main goal is to equip these bodies with necessary skills to formulate and execute city development plans and also to raise funds from different sources as well as their effective utilisation.

SPUR also has a component for improving conditions of urban poor under slum area development programme.