This is not something that our local government bodies would like to read: that they have been capitalising on increases in public land values and natural economic growth through leasing and sales to finance their infrastructure needs, whereas they have been spending less than the nationally-accepted norms for provision of various local public services.
“On average, taking all cities into account, revenue from land lease and/or sales by UDAs (urban development authorities) accounts for nearly 90 per cent of existing own-source revenues of municipal corporations, 33 per cent of their total revenues, but more than 900 per cent of property tax revenues,” write Kala Seetharam Sridhar and A. Venugopala Reddy in
State of Urban Services in India’s Cities: Spending and financing (www.oup.com).
Looking at the relationship between finances and public service delivery, the authors rue that none of the cities selected in their study spends adequately on local public services in relation to the widely recommended norms for such spending. In the case of labour-intensive services such as sanitation and solid waste management, they observe a direct relationship between finances and service delivery, because services are dependent on wages to personnel to get the work done. “So with respect to these services, if cities are unable to spend, then the quality of services also stands to suffer.”
Full report
here Hindu
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