Bengaluru West City Corporation has turned to AI to improve property tax collection and reach people who have payments pending by the city’s residents who have outstanding tax and to reach out to those who have not paid up what they owe the tax and receive the payment.
The municipality has launched an AI-based voice calling campaign for property owners with outstanding property tax, which will send notifications to them and will be able to reach them when they come to know the pending amount to pay up, the time of the past or next step for the tax to be paid, where the tax is still pending and the best way of payment online.
The calls are being carried out in Kannada to make the communication easier for property owners and increase the chances of receiving payments and making them timely.
The initiative was launched after officials discovered that many property owners were unaware of the exact amount of tax pending against their properties, how long the dues had been unpaid and how to pay online. Rather than having the corporation rely on officials to directly contact thousands of taxpayers, the corporation used an AI voice agent to send the first communication to the people involved and provide basic information directly to property owners.
Between March and June, the AI voice agent made around 4.54 lakh calls in 64 wards out of the corporation’s previous 198-ward jurisdiction. Of those calls, 59,604 property owners were reached. The system told residents about the outstanding property tax amount, when the dues remained outstanding and the available online payment procedure.
The response to the campaign has opened up a possibility of recovering a significant amount of outstanding revenue. 26,962 property owners were contacted through AI and agreed to pay their pending tax, enabling the civic body to recover approximately ₹35.1 crore in dues. 10,303 of them said they will make the payment by a specific date, and 5,747 said they will pay in a short time.
Officials say the AI system could also lessen the workload on revenue department personnel. Personally contacting thousands of property tax defaulters requires large amounts of time and can put enormous pressure on officials such as Assistant Revenue Officers. Traditional calling campaigns also require large call-centre operations when hundreds of thousands of taxpayers need to be reached in a short period.
With AI for the first outreach, officials can then spend their time on cases where they need to help with direct intervention, field verification or additional assistance. The corporation believes the system will make administration more efficient and allow revenue staff to concentrate on more complicated property tax cases, and the corporation will hence be able to reduce administrative burden in the future.
The campaign also helped to identify some problems in the corporation's property tax database. When officials were calling, they found 17,314 inactive mobile numbers and 6,315 phone numbers belonging to previous property owners. This information can help the corporation update and clean its records so that future communication reaches the correct property owners.
The campaign also confirmed that 4,577 properties did not have any pending tax dues. This is important because it prevents unnecessary collection calls from happening to owners who have already paid off their tax liabilities. Updating those records would make tax records and the corporation’s taxpayer database more accurate and help alleviate confusion among residents.
The AI voice technology used for the campaign was developed by Bengaluru-based startup Vocal Labs. The company was set up by IIT Madras-based alumni Nilesh Kumar, Mrityunjay Das and Raag Sunil. The startup began this to solve challenges faced by the civic bodies in revenue collection, most notably the difficulty of communicating with large numbers of residents in their preferred local languages.
Bengaluru West City Corporation Commissioner Rajendra K.V. explained that one of the biggest challenges for the civic body was not only finding out who is a defaulter of property tax but reaching out to each and every person and explaining the dues in a language they could easily understand. AI-based technology has made it possible to conduct such conversations a lot more effectively at a much bigger scale.
As officials said, sending a tax notice and talking to a taxpayer is very different. A written notice is helpful for knowing about outstanding dues, but an interactive call can explain the amount payable and guide residents through online payment. The campaign pointed out that some taxpayers didn’t know about the outstanding amount and that there was a relatively easy way to pay with the online payment service.
At the same time, the corporation has warned residents to be wary of fraudulent calls made in the name of property tax collection. The municipal body will not request residents to pay tax on the phone, officials said. It will not seek sensitive information from customers such as OTPs, card numbers, UPI PINs or bank account details, they said.
Property owners with outstanding dues will only be advised to pay through the official Karnataka property tax portal or to visit the ward office or Assistant Revenue Officer's office. The corporation's use of AI is a landmark step towards technology-based civic administration, and the results from the campaign may encourage greater usage of local language digital communication services for public services.
