GHMC trifurcation glitches take toll on Early Bird property tax drive

Property tax collection during the Early Bird scheme might get affected due to the trifurcation of the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation into three different corporations, namely GHMC, Cyberabad Municipal Corporation and Malkajgiri Municipal Corporation.

Early Bird scheme offers a rebate of five percent on the total annual payable tax if paid within the first month of the year. Every year, the scheme earns a large bounty for GHMC as property owners vie to avail the concession by paying effortlessly online.

This year, many consumers are struggling to pay the tax as the website has undergone changes, and the tax payment appears under the name of Core Urban Region Economy instead of the corporation concerned. “I have been unable to pay the tax online despite several attempts, as the payment options are not working. I got an error message repeatedly that the selected payment gateway was under development,” Srinivas Nayak, a resident of Chintalkunta said.

The same complaint was heard from several others. All the payment options appear bunched under a single push button. If one still goes ahead with payment selecting it, one gets the error message.

The SMS blast which would send customised links to each property taxpayer for easy payment, has not been initiated yet, a week into the Early Bird window. While a few owners in the GHMC limits have received the messages, a large number are yet to get them. In Cyberabad and Malkajgiri corporations, the SMSes have not yet been started.

“Till last year, we paid the tax through Bill Collector who would visit once every month. We did not get any message or link so far,” shared Vinayak, another property owner from Nizampet. Nizampet was a separate corporation till last year, and one among the 27 urban local bodies to be merged with GHMC at the end of 2025. Now, it is part of the Cyberabad Municipal Corporation.

Last year, GHMC got a total ₹900.93 crore in the Early Bird scheme which was 44% of the previous year’s total collection of ₹2,038 crore. In the 2025-26 financial year, the collection for the CURE area stood at mere ₹2,558.8 crore, which is way less when juxtaposed against the expansion in the scope from 650 square kilometres to more than 2,000 square kilometres.

Of the total, the highest ₹1,000.36 crore was collected from the Cyberabad Municipal Corporation’s purview, while Malkajgiri Municipal Corporation accounted for mere ₹562.62 crore. The newly constituted GHMC’s collections stood at ₹995.82 crore, which is merely ₹94.89 crore or 9.6% higher than the Early Bird collections from its previous form. This is despite the One Time Settlement scheme, which entailed 90% waiver on the penalty, and heightened enforcement towards the end of the year.