India : Urban Property Taxes in Selected States

Property taxation has a long been a vexing issue in India, and continue to be. India faces a major structural problem with its property tax systems, resulting from the failure to resolve conflicts between assessing the true market value of property with rent control ordinances, and other limitations such as the FSI. Moreover, government officials have generally been unwilling to issue new valuation rolls, in some cases for many years. Much of the recent property tax reform in India has entailed stop-gap measures to overcome these problems, rather than engaging in comprehensive reform. Meanwhile, the growth of property tax revenues has remained anemic. Unless these structural issues in properly valuing property are resolved, improved administration will do little to make the property tax a valuable revenue source for local governments, and the gap between their local expenditures and revenues in likely to grow over time.