Property owners in Varanasi who are behind on house tax have until 15 November to sign up for the municipal corporation's one-time settlement scheme, after which the Varanasi Municipal Corporation says it will begin attachment of houses and property and take legal action against defaulters.
According to the corporation, about Rs 298 crore in house tax, including interest and surcharge, is outstanding on 97,872 buildings across the city. Roughly Rs 86 crore of that amount is surcharge and interest, and that is the part the settlement scheme, known locally as the ekmusht samadhan yojana, waives in full.
The response so far has been thin. The scheme has been open for about a month and a half, but only 6,810 owners have registered on the portal, the corporation said, and 2,476 of them have actually deposited money, a total of around Rs 3.96 crore.
Put those figures side by side and the gap is plain. By our arithmetic, fewer than seven in every hundred buildings with dues have registered, and the money collected so far is a little over one percent of the total pending.
Municipal Commissioner Himanshu Nagpal said on Tuesday, 6 October, that 15 November is the last date to register and that there will be no further extension. Owners who register by then will have until 31 December to deposit their dues and will still get the full waiver of interest and surcharge.
Owners who skip registration will have to pay both the principal tax and the full surcharge, the commissioner said. Once the deadline passes, the corporation has said, it will move to attachment, called kurki, of houses and other property, along with legal proceedings against those who still have not paid.
In practice, the scheme works in two steps. The first is registration, which can be done at the owner's zonal office or through the corporation's online tax portal. The second is payment of the principal amount, which can be made any time up to the end of December. Registering early does not mean paying immediately, which gives owners some breathing room to arrange the money.
The corporation has been chasing defaulters with text messages and phone calls, according to its statement. Owners who have received such a reminder, or who are unsure what they owe, can check their assessment at the zonal office before the November rush begins. That leaves about five and a half weeks from today.
The settlement scheme itself follows a state government order of 20 July 2026, which the corporation's executive committee approved before the scheme opened in August. At the time, the corporation said it would hold special payment camps at its zonal offices from 15 August to 15 December, with dedicated counters at its headquarters, the zonal offices and the city's water tank offices.
Private homeowners are not the only ones on the list. An earlier list released by the corporation in August showed government departments also owing it house tax, with the Public Works Department and BSNL among the larger dues. The current notice does not say how much of that has since been cleared.
House tax is one of the corporation's main sources of its own revenue, and it pays for the everyday work residents tend to notice only when it fails. Street lights in dark lanes and blocked sewers were exactly what councillors raised with the municipal commissioner earlier this month, while Nagpal has also been ordering extra drainage pumps at the city's immersion ponds ahead of the festival season.
Waivers of this kind are a familiar tool for civic bodies trying to clear old arrears without long court battles. They depend on owners coming forward, though, and the warning about attachment is the corporation's way of making clear that the soft option has a closing date.
For the 91,000 or so buildings whose owners have not yet registered, the choice is now a matter of dates. Sign up by 15 November and pay the principal by 31 December, or face the full bill with surcharge, and possibly a notice of attachment, in the new year.
