Hyderabad: In the wake of Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) mandating mobile number and OTP use in making online payments for property taxes, the people are facing difficulties due to which GHMC suffering huge revenue losses. In case of change of mobile number, the people are facing even greater difficulties as the new mobile is not being accepted by the website.
GHMC has given facility to the people by introducing online payment facility and people were paying their property taxes smoothly online till recently. However, after introducing OTP system the people started facing difficulties.
Those people who have not registered their mobiles or facing difficulties in making property tax payment they have no option but to reach to the Municipal offices for payment but even there they are made to wait for hours citing technical difficulties.
Owing to these issues the people have given up their interest to pay property taxes to GHMC due to which its revenue has decreased drastically.
Before introducing the new system the municipality was earning Rs 1 to 1.2 crore daily through online payment which has been decreased to Rs. 20 to Rs. 30 lakh now.
There are 13 lakh people in the jurisdiction of GHMC paying property taxes and about 50% of them were paying their taxes online while the rest were paying the taxes through bill collectors, CSC centres and me-seva centres.
According to GHMC, about 60% decreased has been recorded in online tax payments. Last year GHMC revenue was Rs. 1703 crore which recorded a 50% decrease this year as the revenue till July is only Rs. 671 crore. OTP issue has been cited as main problem for such decrease in GHMC revenue.