Aurangabad: The civic body on Thursday announced that citizens can now pay their property tax in any of the nine zonal offices.Municipal commissioner D M Mugalikar told TOI that property owners, irrespective of their municipal zone, can visit any zonal office and pay the tax. "We have directed all our zonal offices to accept property tax from residents irrespective of their zones," he said.Mugalikar said the move would give options to the tax payers and ultimately reduce rush in some locations. "The move is also to give respite to commercial property owners having their shops in different zones," he added.As of now, a property owner could pay his tax only in the concerned zonal office. "The municipal body had failed to recover desired property tax in previous financial year, but in the current fiscal we wish to the meet the target. Thus, we are making some changes in the existing set up. For the first time, the civic body is dealing with the tax payers categorised in nine zones instead of the previous six zones. This will allow us to focus on more tax payers," Mugalikar said.Considering the growth of the city, the municipal body had created three more municipal zones taking the number of zones from six to nine in 2016. However, the tax collection department could not divide the properties in nine zones for the financial year 2016-17.Apart from this, in order to improve tax collection and access untapped properties, the civic body will take help over 100 engineering students from two city-based colleges."One of the renowned engineer colleges has already agreed to provide 50 students of civic engineering branch to assist municipal authorities in accessing new properties. One more college will also provide a similar team that would create an additional force of 100 students to be deployed for assessment of untapped properties," the civic chief said.

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