Telangana leaves GHMC fund-starved

Hyderabad: The Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation is heading toward a deep financial crisis as its income is dwarfed by its expenditure. The civic body's finance department officials lament that within less than two months, the corporation might not be able to pay salaries to its employees and it has no option but to depend on loans to take up the government's flagship programmes like the Strategic Road Development Plan, Comprehensive Road Maintenance and regular maintenance works. Though the corporation has prepared the ground to fund the SRDP with Rs 2,500 crore term loans at about 10 per cent interest rate and handed over the maintenance of 709 arterial roads with an estimated cost of Rs 1,827 crore, it is still short of money. Though the government has assured providing `100 crore every month to rescue the corporation from the financial crisis, officials claimed that with heavy interest rates and expenditure, the corporation would be bankrupted in less than two months and it would not pay salaries during January. A senior GHMC official, on condition of anonymity, said that the civic body has been paying about `300 crore towards salaries of employees and has been spending about `120 crore on maintenance work on a monthly basis.