KATHMANDU, MAY 30

Kathmandu Mayor Balen Shah's decision to hold executive body's meetings openly allowing media outlets to broadcast/telecast live has earned praise from good governance experts and right to information activists.

Former president of Transparency International Nepal Khemraj Regmi said that Shah's decision to allow live coverage of the executive meeting would help the capital city ensure good governance and make its representatives accountable to voters.

'Mayor Shah's decision to allow live coverage of Kathmandu Metropolitan City's meeting will give the public a chance to determine which representatives are making their arguments with good or bad intention. The public will also determine if any representative wants to make the mayor a failure,' Regmi said.

He said live coverage of the meeting would make the representatives accountable as the public could grill them if they failed to fulfil the pledge they made at the meeting.

'Transparency is an important tool to reduce corruption.

If the executive meetings are transparent, it will certainly help reduce corruption and ensure good governance,' Regmi added.

He said Mayor Shah's decision to conduct open executive meetings would also build pressure on other government agencies and other layers of government to conduct their meetings openly.

Governance expert Rajendra Adhikari also said transparent meetings of Kathmandu Metropolitan City would help ensure good governance.

'People should appreciate Balen Sah's initiative to hold meetings transparently,' he said, 'Transparency remains a big concern in Nepal where often executive decisions are taken in dark rooms about which people are not aware. People have the right to know what decisions the executive has made but often they do not know or they come to know about those decisions much later,'

Adhikari said. He said the public should give positive feedback to the mayor after seeing live coverage of the meeting.

Right to information activist Advocate Baburam Aryal said that Mayor Sah's decision to hold open executive meeting could be judges right to the extent that those meetings serve public interest.

'But there are some issues that could be of strategic importance and other issues that may not be of interests to the public, such issues should not be held in an open meeting,' Aryal said.

He said budgetary discussions of metropolitan cities could not be held in open meetings.

Open meetings do not always help agencies fully check corruption. It's the policy decisions that benefit the corrupt so efforts must be made to have right policy decisions, Aryal argued.

A version of this article appears in the print on May 31, 2022, of The Himalayan Times.