Property tax collection has existed since ancient times, and land tax assessment has been a foundation of open funds in both Europe and Asia through many ages. It has all but ceased to be a significant revenue source in any part of the world (Ehtisham et al.,2014). In India, tradition of taxation been followed from the Mughal period and in 1901, during British India, taxes of land were more than half of the total revenue tax which was about 5% of GDP (Borsio,2014). Later on, as per Government of India Act 1935, control of property tax comes under the elected state government and other modern tax such as income, customs and exercise come under Central government. The political strategies changed, as the elected political representative don’t show concerns taxing local vote. There was therefore pressure on the Centre to use its instruments, and to feature to the quality of the colonial power. This leads the fall of property tax and as result in 1947 it was just 7% of total revenue.
For any local or municipal body, property tax is reflecting the relation between the types of services financed at the local level vs the benefit to property values, so it is considered as a good tax Slack (2011). Unfortunately, Property tax is most hated tax by taxpayers. One of the reasons is that tax rates are different for the residential and non- residential properties, to make it unpopular among citizen. The other reasons for unpopularity as it is visible tax or can say direct tax and transparency of its expenditure is not very visible. The other reason is that it is an inelastic tax, which does not increase automatically over time. Again, increasing the tax rate to increase tax revenues will lead greater taxpayer resistance. In addition, most important, poor administration is major reason for its fall, which affects not only the revenue collection but also on the equity and efficiency of the revenue.
Any given local governing authority which is collecting tax face on following issues: Large number of properties are not taxed because of the loopholes, inexplicable and expensive issues barred new properties to bring into the taxation regime, Outdated mapping of properties, Compliance of laws, Mismanagement of the information and technology, Inadequate staff and equipment (Nieminen et al., 2002). In most of the developing countries, the most common problem is growth of illegal land subdivision, which causes growth of urban sprawl as unauthorized or unapproved colonies. The study also brief the reason of this rapid growth of unauthorized colonies on the point of buyer, colonizer and political aspect which shows inefficiency of governance in reference of management, policy implementation, poor economic structure, corruption and political influence. The recommendation has been given in term of regularization of Policy objective and Process and implementation of scheme, Penalization charges, Property & Vacant land tax, Level of Awareness, Alternate Scenario for Regularization, Land Registration, Purchase and Sale of land, regulations of Building byelaws, Identification of unauthorized colonies(Swain et al., 2016). It can be outlines that major issues behind the lesser taxation of properties are lack of complete database having data of properties in term of spatially and non-spatially information with the capability of transparent interaction with both government as well as citizen.
Considering the issue, GIS is a modern technological tool for effective and efficient storage, retrieval and manipulation of spatial and non-spatial data for deriving scientific, management and policy making information (Mathur et al., 2009). It has the capabilities to supply statistical and spatial record and capability for creation of base-maps, formulation of designing proposals and to act as monitoring tool during implementation phase of any planning scheme (Gupta et al, 2001). Integration of IT and GIS has capability to modernize the current process of Government (Garg, 2015). Geographical information System has been successful used for the count of properties under concerned jurisdiction by few urban bodies, which result improvement in revenue. The record of the property should be kept on the categorization of properties based on its usage such as commercial, health, education and its exemption such as religious, charitable of government so that it will be feasible for the study of tax assessment. Other important part is gap between tax billing and collection. Using CAD or ESRI platform software the data can be store in one spatial database as feature dataset enable with access through the structured query based language, both geographic as well as its attribute.