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After days of reeling under the nauseous stench of garbage, the national capital of India is finally breathing more freely. The safai karamcharis (sanitation workers), who had refused to turn up for work and had instead dumped mountains of garbage in several localities and streets of Delhi because they hadn't been paid salaries for two months, are back at work.
The crisis, which had become a tug-of-war between the Aam Aadmi Party-led Delhi government and the Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled municipal corporations, seems to have been resolved with the intervention of the Delhi High Court. On its directions, the state government has released about Rs 500 crore and the pending salaries have been paid. Order has been restored.
Or so it seems.
The garbage that dirtied the city was an ugly manifestation of the problems Delhi is living with. Until 2012, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, or MCD, was one of the two civic bodies, the other being the New Delhi Municipal Corporation, looking after the day-to-day functioning of the city - ensuring that the streets were cleaned, garbage was collected, streetlights worked, parks were maintained, and so on.
In 2012, the Congress government in Delhi decided to trifurcate MCD into East, North and South Delhi Municipal Corporations. Instead of one, the city got three mayors, three standing committees and three departments of everything. Expenses multiplied. But the split, it was argued, was important for "governance at your doorstep".
When the civic body was split, the area governed by South MCD had the largest chunk of income-earning avenues, while North and East MCDs ended up with more expenditure than income. Cash-strapped and struggling to stay afloat, the two MCDs were the ones that faced the wrath of nearly 30,000 unpaid sanitation workers. It was North and East Delhi that became the garbage war fields.
South MCD, in contrast, earns more than it spends and hence encountered no such problem.
This contrast is also visible in the state of the headquarters of the MCDs. Far from the sanitised environment of the Delhi Civic Centre, the city's tallest building that houses the swanky head office of South MCD, is the headquarters of East MCD. The paan-stained walls of this grey building in the congested Patparganj industrial area across the Yamuna are symbolic of the state of affairs.
In his office, as East Delhi Mayor Harsh Deep Malhotra deals with a stream of visitors who have come with various requests and complaints, he also gets calls asking him to get the garbage removed as soon as possible. In between he discloses his financial woes. "The state government has given us Rs 134 crore with which we have paid the salaries pending till May," says Malhotra. "But how will we manage the salaries for June and later?"
Loan burden
A look at East MCD's finances presents a grim picture. When the corporation was trifurcated in May 2012, East MCD inherited 9 per cent of the area and 25 per cent of the population. The revenue it generated was 14 per cent of the unified corporation, while its expenditure was 24 per cent. This income-expenditure gap came to about Rs 421 crore a year.
Besides this, the unified MCD had an outstanding loan taken from the government of Delhi. Malhotra says the Sheila Dikshit government had assured them that this loan would be written off and that the three new corporations would begin with a clean slate. Instead, East MCD inherited a loan liability of Rs 417 crore. To deal with its income-expenditure gap, East MCD received another Rs 335 crore from the Delhi government as loan at an interest of 10.5 per cent and recoverable in four years. So total loans at the time of its birth added up to Rs 752 crore.
Since then, the income-expenditure gap has expanded: East MCD earned Rs 931 crore in 2014-15, while its expenses were Rs 1,680 crore, leaving a deficit of Rs 751 crore.
Like in East MCD's cases, an outstanding loan of about Rs 638 crore was passed on to North MCD at the time of trifurcation. North MCD's annual revenue falls about Rs 1,000 crore short of its expenditure.
"For us, property tax is the main source of income," says North Delhi Mayor Ravinder Gupta. In Delhi, property taxes range from 6-10 per cent depending on the category of property. "Maximum prime properties, or those that fall in categories A, B and C, fall in South Delhi," adds an official of North MCD. East and North MCDs largely have properties in categories D to F, which earn less tax revenues.
East Delhi also has a large number of authorised colonies that are not taxed. "Nearly 70 per cent of East Delhi properties are in unauthorised colonies and the Delhi government has restricted the municipal corporations from collecting tax from them," says Malhotra. The standing committee of East MCD has, however, now given a go-ahead for the collection of property tax from unauthorised colonies. This would put 243 such colonies under the tax net, though the East MCD is yet to approve this move. This could well turn out to be another flashpoint between the Aam Aadmi Party-led government and the municipal corporation.
On the expenditure side, the biggest drain on the corporations is employee salaries. "The three MCDs together have about 1,60,000 employees, with sanitation workers being the biggest segment," says South Delhi Mayor Subhash Arya.
So high is the salary bill that the three MCDs are left with hardly any money for works like installing and repairing street lights, buying medicines and medical equipment, meeting school expenses and ensuring sanitation. And that is a worrying reality for the city.
Inadequate grants
Every month, sanitation workers are the first to be paid. And Class I employees like teachers and doctors are the last to get their salaries. While the misery of the sanitation workers became visible as it raised a stink, other stories of unpaid staff went unheard.
The corporations also pay old age, widow and disability pension. "From every ward (Delhi has 278 wards), 700 people are paid Rs 1,000 each under this head," says a North MCD official. For the last one year, none of these people has received this pension. At East MCD, unpaid old age pension for the last 26 months stands at Rs 117 crore.
As decided by the Delhi Finance Commission, the Delhi government has to give the civic body 10.5 per cent of its total tax collection to bridge the deficit. Of this 5 per cent is education grant - for MCD-run schools. Of the remaining 5.5 per cent, 1.5 per cent is rather ambiguously defined and has almost never been given to the corporations. Some call it social reform money, others call it performance-based share and yet others say this is the amount they will get once they start showing profits.
"We have been told East MCD has not shown any social reform," says Malhotra. "And yet we run a hospital where people are charged minimal fees, have opened a 120-bed maternity and child care wing, have a new 44-bed private ward and other such initiatives."
East and North MCDs are desperately seeking help from the Delhi government. But Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal argues it is corruption that is responsible for the mess in the two corporations.
That might not be the whole truth. But an official in one of the corporations says that the MCDs too need to get their act together. "Too many properties are lying unutilised or underutilised. Many are not taxed for various reasons," he says. "If that is done and the state government is prompt and fair with releasing grants and the burden of past loans is eased, this city would function much better."
Else, dirty politics could raise a stink again, literally.
