Opinion: A city cannot tax what it refuses to maintain

Every municipal argument eventually arrives at the same pavement. The Greater Chennai Corporation wants 6 per cent more in property tax. Residents from 425 associations want to know why the water connection has not arrived, why the sewer overflows, why the road laid last year is dug up this year, and why the stormwater drain fills the street it was built to empty. Both sides are talking about money. Only one side is standing in the water while talking.

There is a fashionable word for what the Corporation is doing: revenue mobilisation. It means the city needs money to maintain itself. That is true, and it is also incomplete. A city does not only mobilise revenue; it mobilises consent. Consent is earned in the unglamorous months when nothing is being inaugurated, when a complaint is closed, a drain is desilted before the monsoon rather than photographed during it, and a new connection is given without a broker. Chennai's residents are not refusing the principle of taxation. They are auditing its performance, street by street.

The 2022 revision, which raised rates by 50 to 150 per cent and went to court, should have been the warning. You can win a tax case and lose a city. The legal power to levy is the easiest power a corporation holds. The harder power is sequencing: amenities first, or at the very least amenities visibly and verifiably alongside the demand. To raise the bill while 139 waterbodies await restoration and a Ramsar marsh negotiates with a dump-yard eco-park is to tell the taxpayer that ecology, drainage and daily convenience are ornaments, while collection is the structure.

None of this requires romanticising the residents' associations. Homeowners' groups defend their own streets first, and a city must also tax to serve neighbourhoods that have no associations, no lawyers and no annual general body meetings. That is precisely why the Corporation should welcome the audit rather than resent it. If the tax is just, show the ledger on the road: this ward paid, this drain was rebuilt, this many connections were given, this waterbody was fenced and revived. Publish it ward by ward and let the same 425 associations check it. Nothing defends a tax like a finished street.

Until then, the residents have the better of the argument, because they have the evidence under their feet. A city cannot tax what it refuses to maintain and call the refusal civic virtue. Chennai does not need a cleverer demand notice. It needs the older, plainer thing every taxpayer is owed: the work, done, where the bill is delivered.