The largest portion of a typical property tax bill in the US typically are school taxes, which can be up to 80% of the total bill in some areas. There are some middle-class homes who pay $10-12,000 a year, with close to $8000 being billed as school taxes. Conversely, there are properties in Pennsylvania, for example, with property taxes of less than $2000 a year which include trash removal, street maintenance, snow removal, policing and school expenditures. A large part of the disparity can be explained by the relative cost of living and the quality of services provided. Even so, I would rate the basic sanitation and street maintenance services in the least expensive and most rundown American towns and cities far superior to that of Bangalore, which is a disgrace to this city. The administration, however, seems only to indulge its propensity for unwarranted bombast.
The recent garbage crisis in Bangalore stemmed from three events: a sanitation workers' strike, a protest by villagers that closed one landfill and a fire at another. That still left two landfills available after the strike, and thus no reason not to keep moving the garbage out of the city. The issue is not primarily of the amount of garbage or the lack of segregation. It is the consistent inability of the city administration to provide even the most basic service in an efficient and timely manner, as old-time residents will know. It isn't enough to merely collect trash door-to-door, and then dump it around the corner and set fire to it every now and then. The existing system, as Americans like to say, "does not work as advertised". Before we talk of segregating and reducing the quantity of trash, we need to have in place an effective system of collecting and transporting trash to proper disposal facilities. Otherwise, what we will end up with is piles of segregated but uncollected trash in the city.
This is a corner nearby which was cleaned up about a year ago. The stenciled bi-lingual exhortations and image of Ganesha notwithstanding, the pourakarmikas(sanitation workers) continue to dump and burn trash there. When I took this picture, part of the trash was still smouldering.
Roads in Bangalore are another example of how not to run a city. I have noted before that there is not a single pothole-free road in Bangalore, and many resemble rural dirt tracks. A perfect example is this stretch of Richmond Road coming off Trinity Church Road, which has been in a state of abysmal disrepair for more than five years, despite being a central artery for people travelling from the east and northeast parts of Bangalore to Electronics City and Hosur. It's more fun if you watch the video in fullscreen!
With its unusual width, fixing the road without major traffic disruption should have been a piece of cake, but the disconnect between the BWSSB and the BBMP combined with the natural inertia of both entities ensures that the ordeal continues.
So now we come to the second part of TUI's question. I think it is worth paying more in taxes if we get better service, but we need to ensure that the extra money will be properly utilized, and that residents on pensions and fixed incomes are spared undue stress. It's not only a matter of efficiently utilizing additional taxes, but also of efficiently utilizing existing taxes. For example, in many middle-class areas, trash collection can be segregated and done on a weekly basis, since they usually have the space to locate trash cans and recycling bins within the premises. Such collection routes can utilize small compactor trucks. Street sweeping can be mechanized using small electric sweepers, perhaps every other day, and residents should be made responsible for the cleanliness of their own sidewalks. As an aside, residents should also be required to remove gardens, fountains, statues, parking slots, and any other obstructions from the sidewalk in front of their properties.
Businesses also need to be educated on taking ownership of the sidewalk in front of their stores/offices in a different way than they are accustomed to now: i.e., not as parking space, work space, display space or trash space. They also could pay more in a sort of categorized business tax, depending on how the business would impact local infrastructure and services. A restaurant, for example, would pay more than a book store of similar square footage. Taxing businesses a bit more and actually providing them service would discourage them from dumping as they do now. Additional revenues can be raised, for example, by licensing private enterprises to construct utility conduits(cables, gas, water, electric) alongside storm drains that they could lease to operators, which would also rid the city of those unsightly tangles of cables hanging between homes and running through the trees, or drooping from the trees threatening to strangle taller pedestrians. That needs to be addressed very soon, and it is better to build a solution before it gets out of hand.
City officials need to demonstrate that they can responsibly utilize their current revenues and efficiently perform the jobs they are tasked with, before people will consent to paying higher taxes. Right now, there is not a single neighborhood in Bangalore which can be considered clean and well-maintained. That is the standing record of the BBMP. An independent audit of BBMP revenues and expenditures, preferably by accountants with certification in International Standards of Auditing, needs to be done prior to any tax hikes to make sure that the taxpayer is getting the best bang for the buck. A thorough analysis of the processes the Pallike uses should suggest ways of streamlining and making them more efficient users of the available resources, and thus also reducing the toll in time and expense for citizens who visit various city agencies. When citizens see wastage of their taxes, it is difficult to convince them that they need to pay more. The BBMP may need to have an outside team brought in to do a ground-up overhaul before more money flows into their coffers from a charged-up citizenry. Certainly we need to pay more to get the sort of services a world-class city deserves, but we also need to ensure that the city is ready, willing and able to put the added revenues to efficient use.
UPDATE: To buttress my point that the BBMP currently does not efficiently use tax monies:
" N R Ramesh, BJP corporator from Yediyur, claims that Bangalore is the only City in India that spends about Rs 430 crore(about $80 million) a year on garbage disposal. Mumbai, that has twice the population of Bangalore, spent Rs 191 crore in the last fiscal, Delhi spent Rs 177 crore and Chennai, which too is larger than Bangalore, Rs 135 crore."
Source: The Deccan Herald
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