The Government of Telangana has been exploring the possibility of expanding the purview of the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) by merging together peripheral corporations and municipalities. All the seven municipal corporations and 30 municipalities which fall under the Hyderabad Metropolitan Development Authority (HMDA) are to be unified with the GHMC to form one urban civic body, along the lines of the merger of three corporations into the Municipal Corporation of Delhi two years ago.
Chief Minister A. Revanth Reddy is said to have issued instructions to Municipal Administration and Urban Development officials to study the feasibility of the proposal and come up with a report. It is proposed that the existing divisions also be re-organised because a few have a population of more than 1,00,000 while a few others have a population of only 30,000.
If this detailed project becomes a reality, Telangana will probably have the biggest civic body in India. The government is said to have decided to centralise urban local governance because of the unequal distribution of funds and the patchy development among urban local bodies (ULBs) around the State capital.
It is true that a few corporations such as Nizampet and municipalities such as Manikonda, Narsingi, and Tellapur are financially better off than others. But financial prosperity does not matter when the facilities in these corporations are poor.
The prosperity — or lack thereof — of most civic bodies largely depends on property tax collections. This is unlike earlier times when civic bodies eagerly awaited grants from the government and Finance Commissions. In several municipalities and corporations outside the GHMC, the property tax reforms proposed by the Central government have been adopted. Accordingly, the basis for calculating the tax has been shifted from the Annual Rental Value (ARV) to the Market Capital Value of the property. Within the GHMC, however, the earlier formula based on ARV continues to be followed, with a few tweaks regarding the fixation of the rental value.
With the changed calculation, residents in corporations and municipalities with higher property prices are paying a higher tax compared to those living within the GHMC. Taxpayers say that civic administration and amenities are not improving according to the higher tax collection.
The GHMC, which is poised to subsume all the peripheral ULBs and grow in size, has never been in a worse situation. After elections to the legislative Assembly at the end of 2023, the corporation has found itself bankrupt and unable to pay salaries as well as pending dues to its contractors. The high amount of borrowings, which were used on road infrastructure such as flyovers and underpasses, have not brought much relief to the citizens who continue to struggle with traffic problems. Sanitation issues have worsened. The sewerage system collapses every time it rains. Illegal structures are flourishing, government lands in the city are being encroached on, and lakes are disappearing while the civic body is struggling with a poor staff strength. Most staff members are reaching retirement age. A third of the sanctioned posts in the GHMC are vacant. Even if all the posts are filled up now, the corporation will still struggle to pay salaries.
Under such circumstances, it is anybody’s guess how the proposed merger can improve local governance. For robust local self-governance as envisaged by the 73rd and 74th constitutional amendments, there needs to be minimum interference from the State/Central governments in the functioning of local bodies. In the case of the GHMC or any other ULB in Telangana, there has always been a top-down approach.
The GHMC council is yet to form statutory ward committees and area committees which should ideally make resolutions for local area development. The State is shirking its responsibility in providing affordable housing to the lower and middle classes of the city. The housing department has been wound up, and the HMDA has graduated from allotting housing plots to aspiring home owners through a draw of lots to auctioning large chunks of government land to realtors, who in turn build skyscrapers priced to suit investors from affluent sections. Rising real estate values are shown as the sole proof of development in urban regions which are plagued by civic issues.
Against this backdrop, it is difficult to believe that the unification of ULBs will help the common citizen.
