Bhubaneswar, May 14: The civic body is planning to take the help of satellite imagery techniques to keep tabs on holding tax defaulters.

An official of the Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation (BMC) said the geographic information system (GIS) maps would help spot each house within corporation limits.

BMC commissioner Krishan Kumar said the civic body had already written to the state-owned Odisha Space Application Centre (ORSAC) to undertake the satellite linked mapping to track defaulters.

Earlier, tax collectors used to visit houses of defaulters to collect holding taxes. But now, they would visit each house and collect the necessary data and take photographs of the holdings (houses) in the corporation area. This information would be fed into the new system. This would give a clear picture of the exact location of the holdings along with its size and type.

After it is done, all the existing households would come under the corporation radar. Besides, new holdings that come up on the outskirts would also be tracked through this system. All these information will be put up on the website of the civic body so that people can check their holdings.

Officials said the exact height and area of a property would not be known from the satellite images. For this the staff would conduct survey and collect information such as exact area, height, types and change, if any, has been done to the holdings. It will also help in tracking false information provided by holding owners.

These will be uploaded so that when a person clicks on the image the detailed data will pop up on the screen describing the house/commercial establishment.

"An officer can zoom in on a particular defaulter's house and can initiate action against the owner. Besides, any suspected holding tax payment would also be tracked through this system," said an official of the corporation.

House owners can also point out if wrong information has been uploaded about their holdings. They can approach the BMC to get it corrected.

The monitoring of the holdings under the remote sensing and geographic information system (RS-GIS) platform will help the civic administrator to detect the false information fed to the system by their own employees or misinformation given by the owners of the holdings.

Kumar said: "Once the system is in place, the civic administrators can trace the new houses coming up across the city and especially those on the outskirts. Tracing the houses will be easy. We hope it will help us track the defaulters and recover pending taxes."

Besides, the corporation has planned to extend online holding tax payment to all its wards in the coming days. At present, online tax payment is done in four wards and the process is on to cover 12 wards by the end of this month. To help the process, the corporation also plans to procure 60 handheld devices that would make the online payment more efficient.