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Billion dollar baby

Photo: P.V. Sivakumar

Taxing times The message is good but taxes should do their work faster

This company has an annual budget of Rs. 3159 crore. The organisational expenses are Rs. 999 crore. Last year the budget was Rs. 2920 crore and next year it is likely to be Rs. 4500 (about $1 billion). A growth of 29.8 per cent. The company is in the business of sanitation, maintaining civic infrastructure, public health, roads and development.

On the company board sit about 150 directors who are elected every five years. Most of the directors have their own businesses and are keen to sit on the board as confidential information is the key to their business model. Each of the corporator wants to cook his own broth.

The company has over 6000 employees after a recent expansion where it took over 12 smaller companies. While this may appear good on paper it is not good news as the area of operation has expanded from 175 sq km to 650 sq km while the budget has just doubled.

Considering the state of affairs, would any company be interested in taking over this company?

Perhaps no.

But funnily, there is a race to be a part of this company.

If you haven’t guessed it this company happens to be the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation for which there is an ongoing electoral race. The people who want to sit on the board are circumspect with their knowledge and slogans but the parties aren’t. One party is promising loan repayment holiday for IT professionals who lost their jobs during recession. Another party wants to set up a call centre and solve people’s problems. Another wants to set up one corporate school per division. Yet another promises setting up of a posse of 3,000 traffic guards. At the rally of another party in Toli Chowki on Sunday night, a speaker talks about pointing fingers, “If someone points a finger at us, they should remember the other four fingers are pointed at themselves. Those four fingers will turn into khanjar (daggers),” he says to claps and cheers.

If you hear all these promises and speeches you might end up thinking that Hyderabadis have a few problems that can be solved on the phone, a few people who need a bit of financial help, children who want to study for 16 hours in corporate schools, traffic which needs a bit of regulation and only one party that can save you from the unfolding civil war.

Sure manifestoes are a load of blah blah. But these key promises of the political parties show how divorced from reality they are or how blinkered the view.

Not one party talks about the absence of pavements, auditing the quality of roads (one stretch of road near S.D. Eye Hospital has been re-laid six times), management of flow of RTC buses, coordination between civic agencies, decongesting by moving businesses to the outskirts (this year there were three industrial accidents that claimed a dozen lives) .

The turf war that is making GHMC poorer is not an issue for our politicos. Last week, the parking fee at Necklace Road has been doubled from Rs. 5 to Rs. 10 for two-wheelers by another civic body.

So, before it is November 23 can we extort some promises and put real issues on the table and get a say on how the city develops in the future?

The GHMC can save some money if it listens to a UK charity. The charity National Trust has joined other environmental organisations in singing the benefits of peeing in the open. “The chemical reaction helps the composting process, while the absence of flushing by 10 members of staff could cut the estate’s water use by almost a third,” said the charity asking the staff to go and do it. At one stroke GHMC can stop wasting the money in building loos instead do something more useful to the city. Right?

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