Nearly one lakh vacant sites pose challenge to Hubballi-Dharwad GIS survey

Hubballi: The Hubballi-Dharwad Municipal Corporation’s ambitious GIS-based property survey has reached its door-to-door verification stage, but identifying the owners of nearly one lakh vacant sites has emerged as a major hurdle for officials and survey teams.

The civic body has launched the Geographic Information System (GIS) survey to create a comprehensive database of every property in the twin cities and bring unassessed properties into the property tax network. While the survey of residential and commercial buildings is progressing, teams are struggling to contact owners of vacant plots because many of them live elsewhere.

Officials estimate that the corporation has around 4.5 lakh properties, including residential buildings, commercial establishments, rental houses and vacant sites. Of these, between one lakh and 1.5 lakh are believed to be vacant plots, though official estimates vary. Around 18,000 vacant-site owners have already obtained e-Aasthi records, making verification easier. However, tracing the remaining owners and collecting their property documents is proving difficult.

The door-to-door survey, which began on September 28, has covered around 32,000 residential and commercial properties so far. The pace has reportedly been affected by public holidays and festivals. Staff deployed by the private agency undertaking the survey also took about a week’s break during the festive period.

The survey contract has been awarded to Mumbai-based Genesis International, which has been working on the project since April 2025. An aerial survey covering nearly 250 sq km of the twin cities has already been completed using helicopters. Buildings, vacant plots and other properties have been mapped. After the field survey, the collected information will be matched with aerial survey data through a process known as ground-truthing to verify the actual status, usage and ownership records of properties.