MLA pays paltry tax for palatial bungalow

VISAKHAPATNAM: He lives in a palatial, three-storeyed house that boasts of a swimming pool and sits pretty on a 1,700 square yard plot of land in the upmarket ASR Nagar area of Seethammadhara in Visakhapatnam. Yet, believe it or not, all he pays by way of property tax to Greater Visakhapatnam Municipal Corporation (GVMC) is a mere Rs 2,400 per annum!
In stark contrast, retired techie G Srinivas has to cough up about Rs 3,500 per year as tax for his humble 1,400 sft three-bedroom apartment in the well-to-do neighbourhood of Muralinagar.
If you are wondering how GVMC has such a strange yardstick for measuring the value of these two properties, then wait till you hear this. The key difference between the two house owners is that the former is U Venkata Ramana Murthy Raju, popularly known as Kanna Babu, the Congress MLA from Yalamanchili.
If one were to go by GVMC’s calculation of house tax for a property in a posh area then residents of ASR Nagar, considered to be a locality inhabited by the rich and the famous and notified as a ‘Posh area’ by GVMC, would be around Rs 24 per sq metre. If the MLA’s house is built on 717 sq yards or nearly 600 sq metres, then going by the prevailing tax rate of GVMC, the house tax should at least be Rs 14,000 per year. “Well this is only a rough calculation - the rates vary as per the facilities inside the house. Just imagine for a house which has a swimming pool, how can the tax be just around Rs 2,400? Even Rs 14,000 is very less,” confessed a senior officer from the revenue section of GVMC.
What is even more shocking than the impunity with which rules are being bent to accommodate the rich and powerful, despite having to shell out such a low property tax Kanna Babu is yet to clear his dues worth over Rs 7,100 up to November 2012 to GVMC, documents available with TOI indicate.
Incidentally, GVMC’s main grosser is the house tax segment. The yearly revenue is estimated to be Rs 150 crore, followed by VLT (vacant land tax) at Rs 16 crore and non-tax (lease and shop rents) at Rs 6 crore. “Out of Rs 150 crore, about Rs 20 crore lands up under the default list, including government departments. There are also cases where people try to hide facts on assessment records and we are trying to iron them out,” said a senior official.