Bhubaneswar, March 28: Residents of the city can now pay their holding tax anytime with the civic body introducing an online payment mode for the purpose under its e-municipality scheme.

They can also visit the Jan Seva Kendras and make the payment manually at the counters. Besides, the taxpayers can pay their annual dues to the Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation's designated tax collectors. At present, there are 72 tax collectors with the civic body.

To make the system more efficient, the corporation will provide the tax collectors with hand-held devices which are equipped with the geo-positioning system (GPS), so that it can link the daily collection to the central server.

The move aims to minimise corruption and increase the system's efficiency. The machine will generate bills after the transaction process is over.

The online collection of holding tax in the city had initially been planned to begin on August 31, 2014, - the occasion observed as the local self-government day. But, it was delayed due to technical problems as the database preparation and procurement of the GPS-enabled hand-held devices took time.

Then it was decided to start the service from November 1 the same year. But, that too did not materialise.

"As the technical glitches remained, the plan of introducing the online collection of holding tax got delayed by over an year. However, the problem has been resolved now with the hand-held support from the Odisha Computer Application Centre. Now, the residents can easily pay their taxes on our user-friendly interface of payment," said a senior corporation official.

He said the latest systems aimed to bring in a transparent tax collection process and trace the defaulters with ease. The online process of holding tax collection is part of the state government's e-municipality initiative. Once successfully executed in the city, the project is likely to be replicated in other civic bodies across Odisha.

The corporation has so far listed around 88,000 defaulter houses in the city. The Odisha Space Application Centre has been given a project to prepare a remote-sensing and geographic information system to detect more defaulters in the future.

Failed to put up property tax in place, the civic body had in 2014-15 collected Rs 23.6 crore towards holding tax whereas the amount during the 2015-16 fiscal touched around Rs 40 crore. In the 2016-17 financial year, the officials have targeted to collect over Rs 50 crore towards holding tax. Had there been proper implementation of the online and manual system, the corporation would have been collected nearly Rs 100 crore holding tax every year.

Besides, carrying on with its earlier practice, the corporation will put up names of the prominent defaulters on the flex boards at as many as 10 major locations to draw the defaulters attention.

"We are going to be stricter with the defaulters, who are not coming forward with depositing their basic payment. To enable the authorities to carry out various projects, we request our citizens to pay their taxes in time, or else they might face other consequences," said mayor Ananta Narayan Jena.

Sources in the civic body said that more than 190 names were there in the defaulters' list, in which people have defaulted Rs 10,000 or above. An official said the defaulting amount by the private buildings would be touching above Rs 8 crore.

"This time, we will put up the defaulters' names in their respective localities. We have taken this decision as the name of a defaulter, who stays at Rental Colony, should not find a place in the flex board put up at Saheed Nagar. The system should be more localised to make it meaningful and effective," said additional commissioner Alok Kumar Kar.

He, however, said that once a defaulter deposited his or her due amount, the person's name would immediately be deleted from the hoarding.