Till October 2008, zonal tax collectors at the Chennai Corporation—a civic body that governs the city of Chennai—were habituated to carrying loads of documents while assessing arrears related to property tax and collecting the arrears from a customer. The whole process was a manual one, and the collectors updated this data on a ledger book, after they collected the arrears from customers. However, with 25 municipal wards all across the state of Tamil Nadu, the tax collectors could submit the updated information only at the end of the week. This data was subsequently updated in the Corporation’s local system.

This delay impacted the tax collection process, since the zonal tax collectors did not have an accurate understanding of the updated information. For example, in many cases, the customer paid the tax and received a receipt. However, since the information was not updated in real-time—there was always a mismatch between the tax paid by the customer, vis-à-vis the information held in the system. Thus, for the zonal collectors referring to this system, it seemed that the customer had not paid the tax.
The scale and scope of the property tax collection process also meant that there was a possibility of a large number of human errors creeping in, due to the manual entry of data.

Mobile tax collection system boosts efficiencies
Understanding the important role that technology can play in overall governance, the Corporation partnered with the Enterprise Services Strategic Business Unit (SBU) at Bharti Airtel, to introduce a system (in October 2008) that would eliminate the process of manually updating records.

To simplify the process of property tax collection, Bharti Airtel developed a customized solution which could be deployed using the BlackBerry. Tax collectors were given a BlackBerry and a small Bluetooth printer that could be used to issue a receipt instantly.  This simple decision to adopt a mobile-enabled tax collection system has transformed the entire property tax collection process.

Today, a tax collector accepts payment and captures the details instantly on his BlackBerry. As the handheld device is capable of connecting with the backend database wirelessly, it can retrieve data from the server and store it locally. Similarly, data stored on the handheld is uploaded to the main server immediately, and both tax payers and zonal tax collectors have instant access to details of arrears. To simplify the task of entering data on the handheld, Bharti Airtel has developed user-friendly forms. Whenever the network is not available, the solution is capable of working in an offline mode, and automatically synchronizing with the server at a later stage, whenever network is available.

“The online tax collection has helped bring down the queues in front of payment counters at the zonal offices. Property tax collection by the Corporation in the previous financial year 2008-2009 was Rs 325 crore. As a result of this technology, we are expecting property tax mobilization in this fiscal in the range of Rs 350 to 400 crore,” says Rajesh Lakhoni, Commissioner, Corporation of Chennai. More importantly, the solution has helped to clear the huge backlog in updating records, since data is instantly captured and updated on the server.

“The system has expedited the process of property tax collection. Today, there is no need for bill collectors to carry loads of documents. All they need to carry is a small BlackBerry, with a Bluetooth printer. As a result, the entire process of updating a particular transaction has been reduced from a period of approximately 2 weeks to just 3 minutes now,” says Milan Rao, Head - Global Voice Business, Enterprise Services, Bharti Airtel.

Today, thanks to the real-time update, the department has a clearer picture of the revenue for any given day. Additionally, the time taken for reconciliation of data has also been reduced significantly. Finally, since the team now has more time to analyze records, the Chennai Corporation is in a better position to boost revenues related to property tax collection.