Abstract
Municipal corporations and authorities have an important role to play in the development of cities and towns in India. These authorities have to provide proper roads for city transportation, sufficient water supply to satiate the needs of the residential, educational, recreational, industrial areas. They need to build drainage networks and reconstruct them so that they can withstand the monsoons. They have a role to play in property tax assessment. This last category is what we are interested in, especially property tax. The importance of bringing IT into the municipal infrastructure is paramount, especially the need to store, retrieve and update large amounts of data. Today, with the use of large storage servers and reliable database management systems, IT empowers the authorities to do all that and much more. There is a transparency and efficiency in the way all the data is managed and administered with the IT infrastructure. However, such a system that manages data could be made even better if we were able to visualize the data and analyze trends in a spatial context. GIS provides a whole new dimension to IT, as it brings the spatial element to IT. GIS enhances the functionality and information that IT gives us, in its own unique way, and most importantly helps in decision-making. The Property Tax Assessment System (PTAS) application was made for Kanpur Municipal Corporation (KMC). It is one such endeavor in making tax assessment simpler and prioritizes areas on the basis of tax revenues collected or due. It helps in the decision-making process and streamlining the workflow of property tax assessment.

Introduction
Municipal authorities all over India understand the importance of bringing IT into their infrastructure and setup. This has led to opening and the consolidation of IT departments in the municipal corporations in the country. Property tax assessment is one of the areas of Kanpur Municipal Corporation where we can use the technology to meet the challenges of storing huge amount of data, and updating it on a continuous basis in an effective manner. For example, a revenue inspector who has to collect property tax from a number of households, would like to know the defaulters in his assigned area, and an IT system would give him a document or spreadsheet listing the names and addresses of the same. However, if the inspector could be shown visualization on the map about where those properties are corresponding to the defaulters, it would give him much more information than a spreadsheet. Similarly, an administrative officer for a ward or zone could login to the GIS system and visualize the properties under his jurisdiction, and see the properties corresponding to defaulters in different colors, depending on the amount to be paid by the defaulters. The Property Tax Assessment System (PTAS) GIS is one such system which attempts to benefit the municipal authorities for all queries related to property tax. Similar kind of systems can exist for water tax management, and any other tax related information system. The functionalities are described comprehensively in this project report document. This project report document will attempt to describe and consolidate the requirements of GIS application designed for the municipal authority. It gives the detailed information of the developed functionalities and the dependencies on GIS.

Objectives

1. Visualization of Kanpur city map showing property tax bills to be paid in different ways like:
   • Based on total amount to be collected from the owner of the property
   • Based on the percentage contribution of the property in terms of amount to be collected, towards the total amount to be collected from the Ward.
2. A query tool, which will allow users to query the property tax information based on threshold value.
3. The following reports will be generated depending on the type of tool the user has selected:
   • The overall property tax information pertaining to individual Revenue Inspectors (RI).
   • The overall property tax collected from a particular ward.

All the above mentioned reports will also show a small map showing the details for visualization purpose.


Data Collection
The data collection includes spatial and non-spatial data.

Spatial Data
Shape file Kanpur boundary.
   Parcel Boundaries    Zone Boundary

Non-Spatial Data
   Ownership details
   Owner name
   Owner Address

TAX ASSESSMENT NORMS from the Corporation of KMC

Data base Design The data base design has the following steps

ER model: Entity Relationship model is the diagram showing the various entities (objects) involved in the project and its relationships.

Application Development
The PTIS is developed using Development environment shown in the figure.


Figure : Logical System Architecture Diagram
Results
When user runs ArcEditor, the PTAS toolbar appears on ArcMap as shown below.


Load Data

When user clicks on the ‘Load Data’ button, the shapefiles are added.

Quick Search
When user clicks on the ‘Quick Search’ button, it will open a form for ‘Quick Search’. This utility will allow user to perform a hierarchical search on the spatial data. The user can search from Zone, Ward, Parcel in a top-down fashion. The user will be able to exercise number of selection options, like creating a new selection, adding to existing selection, remove from existing selection and select from current selection. The user can also search by ‘Owner Name’ attribute of the parcel, optionally using wild cards. The user can then zoom to a particular result if desired.

Data Entry
When user clicks on ‘Data Entry’ button, a login form for the administrator appears. On successful validation, a data entry form will be opened. In this form, administrator can enter all the attributes for the currently selected parcel.

Total Unpaid Tax Visualization
When user clicks on ‘View Defaulters’ button, it will show the parcel layer in different shades of colour scheme, depending on the total balance amount to be paid by the owner of each parcel.

Percentage Unpaid Tax Visualization
When user clicks on ‘Percentage Balance’ button, it show the parcel layer in different shades of color scheme, depending on the contribution of each parcel in terms of percentage to the total unpaid amount in the whole parcel layer

Query Tool
When user clicks on ‘Query Tool’ button, it will open a query form. In this form user can build his/her query by selecting a balance amount for property tax and use some logical operators. The query is fired on the parcel layer and accordingly, the parcels satisfying the condition are selected in the parcel layer. The query can be saved as an expressions file, and a saved expressions file can be loaded to use a previous query.

Create Layer
When user clicks on ‘Create Layer’ button, the currently selected features get converted to a new temporary layer which gets added to the table of contents.

Report Generation
When user clicks on “Report Generation” button the report wizard provided by ArcMap will open. User can then use whatever attribute fields from the current layers in the map to generate a report.

Notice
When user clicks on “Notice” button it will open a document in Microsoft Word with a pre-defined template for a currently selected parcel for which there is balance property tax to be paid. This document is a notice to be sent to the defaulter, which will include details such as Zone, Ward, Parcel number, name of defaulter, name of revenue inspector and balance tax to be paid.

Conclusion
The PTAS application is aimed in the main at municipal corporations who have a lot of common requirements as far as utilization of GIS technology is concerned. In some cases, the integration of GIS with the existing systems is necessary. The full benefit of GIS can be obtained wherever such integration is possible. The PTAS application is easy to use and understand for any user.

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