The District Office of Special Planning has completed a survey of commercial properties on 117 roads in the city that will help it collect millions of rupees in conversion fees over the next two years.
According to the survey, completed earlier this week, there are 17,493 commercial properties on the 117 roads declared commercial by the city government. The survey, conducted according to Rule 67(4) of the Punjab Land Use Rules, includes a photograph and a profile of each property.
Officials with the District Office of Special Planning said that 80 to 90 per cent of the properties in the survey were earlier unaccounted for and they had not paid fees for the conversion of residential property to commercial property.
The officials said that since 2001, around 800 properties had paid conversion fees while around 400 properties had paid one instalment of the fee before backing out. They said that it was likely that officials serving notices on these properties for payment of commercialisation fees let them off the hook after getting their palms greased. They said that the district office had no record of which properties had been served notices.
District Officer (Special Planning) Umme Lala Naqvi said that the survey would help prevent corruption, as well as help the city government identify commercialisation trends in the city. She said that a demand and collection register for commercialisation fees would be maintained to monitor defaulters and collectors. She said that the office would aim to collect conversion fees from all the properties identified in the survey in two years.
Naqvi said that her office had written to the district coordination officer asking that the setting of annual revenue targets for the collection of commercialisation fees be reviewed.
Owners of residential properties wishing to use them for commercial purposes must pay a conversion fee of five per cent of the property value, if that value if less than Rs1 million; 10 per cent for properties valued at between Rs1 million and Rs10 million; and 20 per cent for properties valued at more than Rs10 million. According to the letter, the fee used to be 20 per cent for all properties.
Naqvi said that having conducted the survey of commercial roads and identified thousands of properties on which conversion fees were due, the district office would have no difficulty achieving this year’s target of Rs300 million. But since the conversion fee was a one-off payment rather than a recurring annual fee, it did not make sense to set an annual target for collection, she said.
The letter, which has also been forwarded to the senior legal advisor, states that the District Office of Special Planning be assessed for recovering conversion fees from the properties identified in the survey over the next two years, rather than be assigned annual collection targets.
According to the survey, there are 2,508 commercial properties on 26 commercial roads in Data Gunj Buksh Town; 686 properties on 11 roads in Gulberg Town; 1,162 properties on four roads in Wagah Town; 1,297 properties on 11 roads in Aziz Bhatti Town; 1,582 commercial properties on nine roads in Ravi Town; 3,015 properties on 18 roads in Shalimar Town; 276 properties on three roads in Nishter Town; 1,436 properties on five roads in Allama Iqbal Town; and 5,531 commercial properties on 30 commercial roads in Samanabad Town.
Published in The Express Tribune, December 3rd, 2012.
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