The Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) has made it mandatory for officials assessing tax dues of a property to check its building plan.
Structures that are built without an approved plan or have deviated from the plan would still be charged property tax. But the assessment (property tax) department has to compulsorily inform the building department about the deviation.
A senior official of the KMC said that earlier the building department used to send a note to the assessment department, which does mutations of new properties, when a building plan was approved.
The assessment department only knew that the building had an approved plan from the KMC, but did not know whether the owners or developers had violated the plan and made additional constructions.
This will be possible only if the officials of the assessment department go through a building plan.
“This will help in better identification of illegal structures. Earlier, the assessment and building departments used to work in silos and one did not know what the other was doing. That created problems,” said the official.
The building department will send a copy of the plan to the assessment department, the official said.
The decision to examine approved building plans comes after Calcutta High Court questioned how the two departments of the same organisation did not know what the other was doing. A bench made the observations after it was found that a man who had built a structure illegally had prepared a fake building plan. The assessment department had done the mutation based on that plan. It later emerged that the plan was fake.
Sources said that if there is a standing instruction that the building department has to send approved building plans to the assessment department, the latter cannot plead ignorance about whether a structure is legal or illegal.
Officials said that buildings that have not deviated from the approved plan will have a completion certificate and assessment department officials will go through the certificate.
Buildings that have come up in violation of the approved plan or those that do not have a plan at all will still be charged a property tax. The mutation of the properties will be done, but the inspection book (an internal record book of the civic body) will mention that the building is illegal.
“It will also be mentioned in the book whether the entire structure or a part of it is illegal,” said a KMC official.
The building department will either regularise or demolish the illegal structures. Usually, minor deviations — the term remains undefined — are regularised.
