Anxiety grips senior citizens of Bengaluru after civic body slaps steep property tax demand over parking area

Time of India

8 hours ago

Bengaluru: For decades, a 75-year-old former CISF officer took pride in living by the rulebook. Having spent his career issuing show-cause notices to errant personnel, he never imagined he would one day receive one himself, and that too from BBMP over a measly car parking area.
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"I never defaulted in my life," Ramesh R said, his voice tinged with disbelief. "I paid my property tax diligently every April, without fail. To get such a notice now, at this age, is deeply hurtful. Why are they torturing senior citizens? Where are we supposed to find money to pay such high penalties?"
He is one of the 31,000 Bengalureans, BBMP has slapped notices on charges of under-declaring or not declaring car parking area while applying for e-khata.
Many senior citizens like Ramesh are wondering why the Siddaramaiah-DK Shivakumar govt is scaring them with legal notices for no fault of theirs. Several senior citizens have been blindsided by BBMP's recent drive to levy property tax on car parking spaces, often based on disputed or incorrect measurements.
BBMP has pointed accusatory fingers at mostly middle-class citizens, lobbing the burden of proof onto their courts.
Gopi K, a resident of KHB Colony, said BBMP's tax demand combined with a penalty is nothing short of a high-voltage electric shock. "My flat is only 1,745 sqft. But in BBMP's records, it's written as 15,000 sq ft! I've been slapped with Rs 4.5 lakh in penalties for five years, at Rs 90,000 a year. Where will a senior citizen like me go for such an amount? It's simply impossible," he said.
Many elderly residents find BBMP revenue officials behaving like tax officials adding the cess, penalties, interests on penalties on inflated tax numbers and giving them sleepless nights and health scares.
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With pension incomes fixed and legal processes daunting, they fear this fight will drain both their savings and their spirit.
Dr Divya S, a resident of HMT Layout, discovered the problem ran deeper. "The main error is in our original manual khata itself. It says my car parking is 180 sqft, exclusive of common amenities, even though my sale deed clearly states 281 sqft. Car parking is part of the common area, it shouldn't be separately taxed," she said.
"The same wrong figure is now in the e-Khata too." The officials should have cross-checked everything before issuing e-khatas.
"This isn't about tax evasion," Ramesh Lal, another former govt servant, said. "We've given our lives to this city — is this how it treats us now?" he told TOI.
Subhash Shetty, BBMP ward committee member, Chokkasandra, told TOI, "There is a clear gap within the system. Top officials need to work closely and take enough inputs from people on the ground to make any pilot project a success.
Citizens are angry and fed up with repeated changes in the khata. ARO and his staff give verbal assurances to citizens but later backtrack on their promises. This gives middlemen a chance to step in and indulge in corruption.
"
Notices issued only in cases of mismatches, says BBMP; skips clarifying critical citizen queries
TNN
Bengaluru: BBMP Saturday claimed it has sent notices only in cases where there is a mismatch between the flat area declared for tax purposes and the area recorded in the sale deed after the civic body came under a barrage of questions over notices issued to thousands of apartment owners.
"Every citizen is liable to pay property tax on the flat area mentioned in their sale deed, the very area they paid for at the time of purchase," said Munish Moudgil, special commissioner (revenue), BBMP. "What we found is that some citizens declared a smaller area in the property tax system than what is stated in the sale deed."
According to him, BBMP's e-khata system now draws data directly from the Kaveri property registration database, which records the exact area of a flat in the sale deed.
This data was electronically matched against the tax-paid records.
The press statement, however, skipped clarifying important queries raised by citizens. For example, how the carpet area transformed into a car parking area in the show-cause notice and how the civic body mentioned random numbers as the areas citizens were using for car parking. In one case, BBMP software picked up 800 sqft of carpet area and pushed it to the car parking area to demand additional taxes, cesses, penalties and interest for the last five years.