Provision sought to end frequent transfer of civil servants in local levels

 Kathmandu, Mar. 22

Provincial policy and planning commissions of all seven provinces and local governments have recommended a provision not to transfer the civil servants deployed at the subnational government offices for at least two years.

In a declaration issued after the conclusion of a two-day coordination meeting on ‘plan formulation, implementation and reporting of governments in federal structure’ on Tuesday, they said that the federal government should immediately provide required human resources to all local levels.

Earlier, in the meeting, organised by the Provincial Policy and Planning Commission of Bagmati Province and managed by National Association of Rural Municipalities in Nepal (NARMIN), representatives of various rural municipalities across the country had said that they were facing challenges in service delivery due to lack of sufficient man power and frequent transfer of executive officers.

A local body in Solukhumbu had witnessed transfer of six executive officers in the past five years, and this has become a trend in many local bodies, said Hom Narayan Shrestha, president of NARMIN.

He demanded that the local bodies should have the right to appoint the needed staff to ensure timely and smooth service delivery.

Likewise, the 13-point declaration read that the fiscal year should begin with the beginning of the Nepali New Year on Baisakh 1 (mid-April) to better utilise the resources. “Although this is not the remedy to the practice of making haphazard expenditure at the end of the fiscal year, ending fiscal year by mid-April would save a significant amount of resources that are wasted in development works after the advent of monsoon,” said Dr. Krishna Raj Pant, Vice Chairman of the Policy and Planning Commission of Bagmati Province while announcing the declaration.

Likewise, the declaration includes a suggestion to the National Planning Commission to inform its important programmes and projects and role of provinces by mid-March each year and the provincial PPCs to inform their target, priority and programmes to the local bodies by mid-April in order to make the development work and budget mobilisation more effective.

“A project monitoring information system should be developed and institutionalised. Result-oriented monitoring system should be applied and level-wise reporting system should be developed,” read the document.

It has suggested categorising the development projects as national pride, large, transformative, and medium and small.

It also demanded that the practice to include non-budgetary projects should be discouraged and budgets should  be allocated to the projects with preparedness including the detailed project report (DPR).

 Published in The Rising Nepal dialy on 23 March 2022.