The Maharashtra government has implemented a vacant land tax to facilitate asset registration.

In a bid to combat irregularities in the registration of properties, the Maharashtra government has announced some stringent rules. The state government has submitted payment receipts of vacant land tax or property tax mandatory for registration of assets, Times of India mentioned in a report.

The Maharashtra government has also made it mandatory the incorporation of the title owner in the adangal copy for agricultural land.

The move has been taken as it was found that the vacant land owners were not paying taxes on time.

Henceforth, it is expected the decision would help the state government garner additional revenues in the current fiscal.

Additionally, the local bodies in urban and rural areas were unable to collect the vacant land tax due to the absence of the property owner database.

The civic bodies, as well as the rural local bodies, have been demanding the state government to transfer details of land sellers and purchasers soon after the registration to track down them to collect vacant land tax.

However, due to technical reasons, the government is unable to share the data on the vacant land.

Maharashtra government had introduced a new property tax system in urban areas linking them with the value of the asset. It replaced the old annual rental value (ARV) tax calculation method with the capital value (CV) tax system bringing uniformity in tax imposition on properties depending on market value fixed by the registration department.

This reform was introduced to prevent irregularities during the levying of the tax by the revenue wing officials in urban civic bodies.

However, the urban civic bodies have been struggling to collect the Vacant Land Tax (VLT) from owners due to the absence of the database.

Earlier, the VLT was not mandatory for selling or purchasing the site in the past.

To fix the anomaly, the government has made the submission of VLT mandatory for the registartion of open plots.