KARACHI: The Sindh government plans to expand its recorded urban property tax base from about 397,375 properties to roughly 2.15 million in 20 local councils under a $150 million World Bank-backed program aimed at boosting property tax collection and strengthening municipal finances, according to official documents.
The Sindh Property Revenues Enhancement Program, or SPREP, would provide $110 million through a Program-for-Results component and $40 million through Investment Project Financing. The Local Government Department is the implementing agency.
The program targets the Urban Immovable Property Tax, known as UIPT. According to the program's Stakeholder Engagement Plan, only about one-fifth of properties in the five divisions covered by the investment financing component are currently surveyed and registered in the UIPT cadastre. Records exist for about 397,375 of an estimated 2.1 million properties.
A GIS-based, door-to-door survey is expected to raise the recorded base in the 20 participating councils to about 2,149,080 properties, a more than five-fold increase. Survey teams will visit homes and businesses, record property details and geo-tag each property for entry into a new UIPT Management Information System.
The 20 councils are in five divisions outside Karachi: nine in Hyderabad, three in Sukkur, four in Larkana, two in Mirpurkhas and two in Shaheed Benazirabad. The program's broader institutional strengthening component will extend to all 45 participating local councils, including 25 in Karachi.
The investment financing component also will pay for digitizing and updating land records by the Board of Revenue, developing a digital master plan that links land and tax systems, conducting city surveys and rolling out an Integrated Financial Management Information System covering budgeting, accounting, payroll and expenditure management.
The World Bank document estimates about 4.5 million people, including roughly 2.16 million women, live in the 20 councils outside Karachi.
The plan acknowledges that the survey will greatly expand government contact with property owners, tenants and businesses, raising concerns about accuracy, confidentiality, identification of enumerators and how records can be corrected. To address them, the government has proposed notifying residents in advance of survey visits, identifying field staff, disclosing recorded information and providing accessible ways for residents to inspect and correct their records. The plan states that the survey is meant to establish a record and is not itself a tax demand.
Town Citizen Committees will be set up in participating towns, each with two male citizen members, two female citizen members and one local council member. The committees will meet monthly to serve as a regular channel between communities and the program.
The plan also warns that the exercise could disproportionately affect or exclude vulnerable groups, including women, older people, people with disabilities, low-income households and residents of informal settlements. The program calls for women-only consultation sessions and female facilitators and enumerators wherever practicable. Telephone, walk-in and written complaint channels will remain available alongside digital systems.
The program draws on the earlier CLICK project in Karachi, where the registered property base reportedly grew from about 900,000 to roughly 4.2 million properties after a survey, following the removal of duplicates, overlaps and properties outside the councils' mandate.
