As the CA polls date approaches, more than half the VDC secretaries in the country continue to stay out of their stations, demanding that politicians be appointed to head them. Since the VDC secretaries have a vital role to play during the polls, the SPA, after showing a prolonged indifference to the problem, has just formed an inter-party committee which is now haggling over the proportion of its constituents’ representation.

The experience of the last decade and half has, however, shown that in order to enable the local bodies play their mandated roles — particularly making the people participate in governance and promote balanced and equitable development of their areas — appointment of politicians hardly serves the purpose. In the early 90s, the Dhading District Development Committee (DDC) was given 300 metric tons of wheat under the Food for Work Programme. The politicians in the DDC met and re-met only to decide that the safest way out politically was to distribute it equally among 50 VDCs.

The politicians in the VDCs too faced the same dilemma. After prolonged deliberations, they decided to distribute the 6 MT of food grain equally among nine wards, which,

after deduction of other costs, came to 65 kg per ward, too little to do any good. The “food” was expended, but there was no “work” done. All this happened under the direct oversight of the politicians who manned the local bodies.

A decade and half on, the All Party Meeting of the Jumla DDC this year distributed the few million rupees allocated for the government’s “One Family One Job” (OFOJ) initiative equally among its 30 VDCs. It was done in total disregard of the rules requiring the VDC population to be the basis of the distribution. The rules also required that the “job” benefits be given only to the recorded unemployed, but some 95 per cent of households in the VDCs claimed the benefit anyway. In small VDCs, individual households received more than Rs 1,000 each, whereas in large VDCs the per house benefit was barely a couple of hundred rupees or even less.

The one saving grace of the initiative was that local labour was used for meeting local needs. The initiative — largely a mimicry of a similar undertaking in India — is fraught with shortcomings. First of all, like CPN-UML government’s so-called Build Your Own Village Yourself initiative of 1994 which set the tradition of large untied block grants to the VDCs annually, the OFOJ allocation — equally populist in nature — would in all likelihood have to be perpetuated too.

According to official sources, this year only 15 man-days of employment were generated under the programme. Its aim — similar to the initiative taken in India — is to provide employment to each unemployed household for 100 days. But the question is: Where will such a large labour force be used in Village Development Committees? After all, labour is only one in the wider composite of components that constitutes a “development project” which would, in turn, contribute to the sustained well-being of the people.

As things stand, Nepal’s rural outlook is dismal and constantly worsening. The country has the highest proportion of workforce in agriculture in the world (78 per cent) but which contributes less than half its proportion to the GDP. Paltry per capita land availability (0.15 ha per capita in 1998), massive underemployment (47 per cent), exodus of labour force (in millions), and volatile political situation constitute the grievous symptoms of its constant deterioration. This downslide continues despite the fact that the Ministry of Local Development (MLD), since its creation in 1979, has spent over Rs 35 billion on the pretext of rural development.

So, while the MLD and the Finance Ministry should have had the foresight to see the problems resulting from an ill-advised OFOJ venture, the National Planning Commission — the agency theoretically responsible for maximising development gains from finite resources — remained a mere spectator of such a reckless exercise. Many donor agencies too have implemented their own, and often mutually competitive, interventions to promote “capacity development” of local bodies during the last two decades, if not more.

The Dhading and Jumla experiences in particular and the dismal rural scenario in particular must lead them to a sobering realisation that while they used up millions of their own money and several years of precious time, they have done more harm than good for the rural poor. To make local bodies relevant to the people, there is an urgent need to redefine their roles so that the beneficiary communities themselves can chart out their destiny. More specifically, more than the fiddling with the politicians, what is urgently needed is revamping of the hopelessly designed Local Self-Governance Act to that end.

Shrestha is a development anthropologist