Pay more, wade deeper: 425 Chennai neighbourhoods reject a tax hike for broken streets

Residents from 425 neighbourhood associations across Chennai have joined to oppose a 6 per cent property tax increase by the Greater Chennai Corporation, arguing that the city must first deliver water connections, sewer lines, passable roads and working stormwater drains. At their second annual general body meeting, the Alliance of Residents' Welfare Associations passed ten resolutions and asked that the hike be halted until basic amenities are in place.

The anger is not new. A far larger revision in 2022 raised rates by 50 to 150 per cent and was challenged in the High Court by residents who said the charges were unjustified while streets flooded, drains overflowed and many homes still lacked water and sewer connections. The Corporation went ahead anyway. The new 6 per cent increase, residents say, repeats the same bargain: pay more now, wait again for services later.

Alliance general secretary J M S Nagarjunan said essential services such as water and sewer connections must come before a heavier tax burden. The associations also pointed to households still recovering from the economic strain of the pandemic years and asked that electricity billing move from a two-monthly to a monthly cycle so that families are not hit with large lump sums.

The resolutions reach beyond the tax bill. Residents urged the Chennai Metropolitan Development Authority to stop reclassifying waterbodies, catchment areas, forests and educational zones for other uses, and called for 139 waterbodies across the city to be restored. They warned that an eco-park proposed on the reclaimed Perungudi dump yard could damage the Ramsar-listed Pallikaranai marshland, one of the last large wetlands holding the city's floodwater. They also sought separate areas for stray dogs and cattle away from dense neighbourhoods, with regular feeding so animals do not forage in residential lanes.

The dispute is, at bottom, about sequence. A tax is a contract: the city collects, the city maintains. When the second half of that contract is visibly unkept, on flooded streets and unconnected homes, every fresh demand reads less like revenue and more like extraction. Chennai's residents are not refusing to pay for their city. They are refusing to pay twice, once in tax and again in the cost of living without the services the tax was meant to buy.