Oped»
Headless local bodies
JUL 29 -
The local bodies have been without elected officials for almost eight years now, and the Ministry of Local Development (MoLD) has largely been sitting pretty all these years, even as its own officials preside over the VDCs, municipalities and DDCs as a stopgap arrangement. However, the ministry has lately sprung into action and has proposed four different “models” for inducting politicians into the local bodies (“Patient MoLD biding time,” July 25, Page 4).
The move has been prompted by the fact that many VDC secretaries, who work on their own and away from the relative security of the district capitals, have lately been the target of extortionist political or criminal elements, and 26 secretaries have already lost their lives at their hands. To add to their woes, a little known political grouping has called them to quit their jobs under the threat of unspecified “action”. The ministry has since been inundated with VDC secretaries tendering their resignation en masse.
The problem with the secretaries has been aggravated by the fact that successive governments have been inflating the amount of annual grants to the VDCs. In fiscal 2009/10, these grants amounted to a possible maximum of three million rupees. But much of the money is used for political purposes, to the dismay of the local people. While this malpractice has been going on for decades, no agency in the government including the MoLD has been keeping track of it. Given such a free-for-all kind of situation, the secretaries increasingly appear as large walking sacks of cash and, therefore, attractive targets for such criminal elements, many of whom use such misuse as the excuse for their “action”.
The proposed MoLD move to reorganise the VDCs is clearly aimed at and limited to trying to shield the secretaries by having local politicians confront those elements. While the ministry may or may not succeed in actually providing security to its frontline officials, the VDC secretaries, it seems that the agency chooses to remain nonchalant about the more compelling need to ensure proper use of its grant money and the revenue that the VDCs generate locally.
The MoLD has been in existence since many decades, and has been mandated to promote multifaceted local development in the communities. However, as at present, during the Panchayat days, the misuse of resources at the hands of the elected Panchas was getting out of hand. Therefore, as a solution to the problem, the Decentralisation Act of 1982 provided, among other things, for the institution of “user groups” composed only of the direct users of projects or services at the grassroots and vested with exclusive authority to plan, implement and manage local projects including financial resources allocated for them. The role of the Village Panchayats (now VDCs) was redefined to play a supportive role at the supra-user group level. The Forest User Groups that restored Nepal’s forests from the brink of desertification have been the product of that act too.
However, with the restoration of multiparty democracy in 1990, the euphoric politicians sent the Decentralisation Act into oblivion and made arrangements for local bodies without substantive authority for them. With pressure mounting from disenchanted local leaders, the government decided to revisit the legislation in 1996, and finally came up with the Local Self-Governance Act (LSGA) in 1999. However, two donor agencies had already become deeply entrenched in the MoLD programmes by that time, and fiercely competed for influence in the formulation of the new legislation by making liberal use of their financial muscle. So, unlike the domestically-innovated Decentralisation Act, the LSGA, for all practical purposes, was more a cocktail that failed to reflect Nepal’s precious lessons of experience in devolution learned during the partyless days before 1990 and the multiparty period hereafter.
One serious lacuna in the LSGA has been the downplaying of the institution of user groups by omitting the necessary details about their formation and functioning, thus rendering the institution the handmaiden of the local political elite. The result has been that it opened the way once again for elected politicians to misuse resources as in the Panchayat days. As things stand, billions and billions of rupees have passed through these local bodies during the last two decades, but the plight of the rural poor—who represent some 65 percent of the country’s 28 million people according to a recent UNDP/Oxford University report—has remained largely unchanged.
Given such a situation, the MoLD’s attention must be drawn not only to the limited purpose of shielding the VDC secretaries but also to ensure meaningful use of its resources. In this regard, a recent initiative by Dhading DDC should be instructive. The DDC piloted a water and sanitation (WATSAN) project in its Gajuri VDC in partnership with a related NGO, NEWAH (Nepal Water for Health). Under the pilot, the principal authority for planning, implementing and managing the individual WATSAN projects rested exclusively with the user groups, including procurement of materials and hiring of technical support. Given its participatory decision making process, the priorities went mostly to the deprived communities in the VDC.
The VDC itself played a crucial role in coordination with user groups and political parties. Based on the authority given to it by the six user groups, and on transparent consultation with their representatives and of the local political parties, Gajuri VDC procured construction material through open tender, and hired a consulting firm too for technical support. As required by the project design, the users made their own contribution in cash to the tune of about 10 percent of the project cost. There was no shramdan voluntary labour (which has always been unjust for the poor), and all the work was done for wages.
The result was that the rich only made cash contributions and did not work, the poor made more money in wage earnings than the cash they contributed. While the project provided one water point for every two households on average and private sanitary latrines to 97 percent of the individual homes, it was completed in a record time of four months only, because all the user groups had the authority and resources to do their schemes simultaneously. More communities now want this approach to be implemented in their areas too, and have since piled pressure on the DDC to that end.
The piloting has three important implications for the problems being faced by the MoLD. First, under this approach, it is the DDC that directly disburses money to the user groups, thus relieving the VDC secretary from handling any cash. Second, the lack of elected officials has not been a hindrance, because the political parties continue to collectively participate in and contribute to the decisions of the VDC and user groups. And third, and most importantly, there was absolutely no misuse of resources. Therefore, for the MoLD , devolving authority to and strengthening the user groups at the grassroots would go a long way in addressing the serious problems that it is confronting at present.
(The author is an anthropologist and has served in the National Planning Commission)
Posted on: 2010-07-30 08:30
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