Introduction
It is well recognised that the Urban Local Body (ULB) of any municipality has an important role to play in the planning and development of its constituent area. However, the financial resources available with ULBs are often insufficient to fulfill its commitments (Rangarajan 2003). In a majority of the ULBs, the annual rental values are used as an indicator for assessing property taxes. This is a challenge on the rent control laws because ULBs have limited scope to increase the rental values with maintaining the prevailing income levels. As a consequence, the tax base becomes stagnant and upward adjustment of tax rates is the only way to increase the revenue from property tax (Somik and Diechman 2006). The equity in property taxation is typically examined by horizontal and vertical measures. The vertical equity assumes that a tax should be progressive (based on income or wealth) and horizontal equity refers that tax payers with equal ability have to share the tax burdens uniformly (Somik and Diechman 2006).

Local bodies play an important role in the delivery of social, economic and infrastructure services like public health, sanitation, water supply besides maintenance of the roads (ICRA 2005). The pace of development due to urbanisation in the recent past is resulting in increasing pressure on ULBs to meet the raising demands of adequate social or physical services for the growing population. Increasing urbanisation also exerts pressure on the natural resources and existing infrastructure (Davis and Wang 2000). Geospatial data has become essential since around ninety percent of the data collected and used for municipal planning and management are related to geography. The geospatial data would help ULBs to manage the available land resources, environment and infrastructure for better assessment of tax collection and for the over all development of the municipal areas.

One of the guiding principles for reforms under municipal finances is about preference for property taxes (with land as base) because property tax is the main source of income for municipal administration functions. It is levied on the constructed assets of the individuals, government and private establishments. A property is assessed when it is constructed, allotted or subdivided. Buildings like temples, charity institutions and houses of ex-servicemen are exempted from property tax.

The focus of ULB’s should change from regulatory to development activities. To meet the increasing demand for creation and maintenance of civic infrastructure requires both financial and human resources. In either case, it requires information to monitor and analyse various schemes/developed activities. It is in this context that best practices through e-governance like ICT technologies coupled with geospatial data from remote sensing (RS), GIS and GPS would provide the necessary data source to support to tax base process.