Kathmandu, April 14:

Government has spent about Rs 6 billion so far for the constituent assembly (CA) elections that was held on April 10.

Of the total expenditures, the ministry of finance (MoF) directly released Rs 2.04 billion

to the Election Commission (EC), while Rs 2.37 billion was given for security arrangements through the Home Ministry and the remaining Rs 1.5 billion was provided by various bilateral and multilateral donors as logistic support.

“All these amounts were spent through the MoF,” said Krishna Hari Baskota, head

of budget division at MoF, adding that all the amount

were released as per the requirement details furnished by the EC and Home Ministry.

The expenditure headings of the EC include mobilising of civil servants for the polls, conducting voters’ education programmes, training of polling officers and volunteers, printing and distribution of poll awareness materials, establishment and management of polling centres and other poll related activities. The largest amount was spent on mobilising more than 2,50,000 government employees as election monitoring officers, district election officers, polling officers and their aides at each of the around 21,000 polling stations across the country.

More than Rs 1.25 billion has been spent within 10 days just before and after the poll date as the major and final activities are carried during this period, Baskota added.

Under the security expenditures, Home Ministry spent about one billion rupees for Nepal Police and to recruit 70,000 temporary police personnel. More than 50,000 from Nepal Police and 25,000 APF personnel were deployed for the security of the polls.

The temporary police were recruited for a month to assist Nepal Police and AFP to ensure free and fair polls. Each of them got Rs 10,000.

Among the donors support worth Rs 1.5 billion, India supported with vehicles, Japan with ballot boxes, China provided ‘election kit’, US supported in printing of ballot papers, while other donor agencies such as USAID, DANIDA, DFID and many other provided logistics and technical support.

When asked about the sources of the government funding, Baskota informed that the government had allocated Rs 1.5 billion for the CA polls in the budget for the current fiscal year 2007-08 and MoF released additional Rs 300 million later.