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Dhadingbesi shows the way
JUN 28 -
As a recent media report goes (“Leaders in Boston get ‘come back’ call”,June 26, Page 1), the US-sponsored seminar on “Team building, developing inter-party cooperation and principled leadership” currently underway in Boston, US has been marred to some extent by the recall by the Maoist leadership of their participants already there. The recall was issued to express displeasure at the US Embassy for its denial of a visa to another senior leader Agni Sapkota. The event is to be participated in by some NC and UML leaders too. However, since there has been plenty of such events organised in Nepal in the past five years, it is clearly quite doubtful if the outcome of the Boston meet would be any more effective in changing the myopic attitudes and hypocrisy of Nepal’s politicians and in breaking the logjam that has wasted the two years of the Constituent Assembly’s life and now threatens to consume the third without a new constitution being written, even as the country continues to pay them handsomely for their non-performance.
But almost coinciding with the Boston event, there was a modest but quite a tangible exercise undertaken for inter-party cooperation and team building on Friday, June 25, 2010 in Dhadingbesi, the district capital of Dhading. The cause was about upscaling the innovative water and sanitation (WATSAN) approach piloted by an NGO, Nepal Water for Health (NEWAH), in a few communities in Gajuri VDC in the district. The approach departed considerably from the traditional practice of installing WATSAN facilities by the government or by donor agencies both of whom generally fail to deliver. While the donor-implemented projects are generally insular in structure and inspired by applying their own methods and by their own managers, the emphasis of the government has almost always been on spending money. There has been very little in terms of institution and capacity building of the users themselves.
The government process of working on WATSAN projects has been opaque at best, if not stinking of corruption altogether. While the participating communities are required to form a user committee and make their own free labour contribution amounting to 20 percent of the cost of the project, in actual practice, user committees are formed of the local political elite or their henchmen, and an informal local contractor—now widely known as “shadow contractor” whose identity appears nowhere in the papers—appears on the scene with the connivance of the local leader and corrupt project officials. The people are exempted from any free labour contribution, and they do all the work within the project’s budget and even manage to save enough for all the three parties, the contractor, the politicians and the project officials, clearly to the detriment of the project’s quality and sustainability. The scheme itself is never owned by the users and is allowed to go through the steady process of disrepair It’s the same story with WATSAN projects funded by local bodies whose money necessarily passes through the local political elite.
In contrast, the NEWAH approach proceeds with the formulation of a master plan for universal WATSAN coverage in the whole VDC. The identified users form their own groups and take charge of doing and managing their own projects. Given the transparent and participatory project selection, the priority goes to the most deprived communities. One major distinctive departure of the approach is that the users make their contribution in cash at a level of about 10 percent of the cost of the project. But there is no demand for free labour contribution, a phenomenon that is highly unjust to the poor. All the work is done for cash wages that enables the poor not only to earn money while working on their own project but also to do so in sums much larger than what they contributed.
The richer people or those who earn more money elsewhere make cash contributions and do not work, thus providing more employment opportunities to poor households. In the same vein, the user groups delegate authority to the VDC to hire a consulting firm for technical support from the market. Similarly, under similar delegation, the VDC also floats tenders for the supply of construction materials, and the contract is awarded in a transparent manner by a meeting of the VDC, user groups and party representatives, thus eliminating any possibility of commission taking in the process. Given these novel attributes, all the six projects were simultaneously implemented and done in a span of four months with the CA election occurring during the time.
Inter-party cooperation
However, the work was done only in six communities, the beneficiaries numbering only 137 deprived households. Other wards in this large VDC of 1,500 households now want the project too. So, in order to seek funds for implementing it in the whole VDC, all the local political parties in the area including the Maoists, NC and UML came together recently at NEWAH’s suggestion and at the initiative of a WATSAN civil society organisation, the Federation of Water Users’ Association (FEDWASUN) and jointly signed a petition requesting their respective district level entities to collectively work for mobilising funds from the government for the project’s implementation in the whole VDC.
Prompted by this petition, the supremos of all the major political parties in the district—the Maoists, NC, UML, RJP and CPN (United)—came together at a meeting in the DDC office and spent some three hours listening to the report on the project and firsthand accounts of the user groups on the merits of the new approach. At the end, they decided to extend the project to the whole district, and signed a “Dhading Declaration” calling upon the Minister for Finance to allocate resources for its phased implementation. They also decided to call on the Finance Minister personally with influential leaders from their national headquarters too joining the delegation (team building, in effect). There was no inter-party rivalry, harsh words or mudslinging at all during the entire meeting.
Decentralised governance
Principled leadership is a structural issue, and not only of discussions. The governance structure should be so decentralised that the politicians always find themselves under the compulsion of having to work individually and collectively to meet the aspirations of the people whom they purport to represent. In the Dhading example, the Gajuri politicians and those at the district level clearly had no choice but to plead for the cause of their voters. If the national level politicians too joined the delegation, they too would only be responding (i.e., being accountable) to the demands emanating from the people of Dhading district. Therefore, to promote principled political leadership in Nepal and to institute decentralised governance that is clearly structured to empower the people at the grassroots as evidenced by NEWAH’s Dhading initiative, the effort has to be made more in Kathmandu than in Boston.
(The author is an anthropologist and has served in the National Planning Commission)
Posted on: 2010-06-29 08:27
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