The Hindu Business Line : Direct transfer of funds to local self-govt bodies mooted

Effective planning
Administrative control of local officials should be fully vested with the LSGs.
Technical officials should be relieved from administrative responsibilities.

Thiruvananthapuram May 1 Direct transfer of funds to the accounts of local self-governments (LSGs) once their plan is approved is one of the suggestions that have been made to improve the efficacy of the decentralised planning in Kerala.

As of now, there have been instances of concentration of flow of funds to LSGs, which are channelised through higher tiers of the panchayat raj system, by the fag end of the financial year.

This has resulted in cumulative delays in the utilisation of funds and manipulative accounting to show expenditure, according to a study conducted by the Programme Evaluation Organisation of the Planning Commission.

The administrative control of local officials should be fully vested with the LSGs, which must have an integrated staff set-up not divided by artificial departmental barriers.

For this, salaries and other administrative responsibilities related to the deployed officials should be transferred to the local bodies at appropriate LSG levels.

Besides, the technical officials should be relieved from administrative responsibilities and they should be totally freed for technical work and to provide scientific inputs required for local body level planning.

Reasons cited

The study found that the productive sector projects of LSGs did not develop into a comprehensive plan and this was mainly due to inadequate capacity of the institutions to formulate the projects scientifically.

The other reasons were weaknesses in the constitution and functioning of expert bodies, pre-occupation of grama sabhas with the flow of benefits to individual members and the absence of horizontal and vertical integration of plans because of near compartmentalised working of the various tiers of the panchayat raj institutions.

As a result, the departmental or grama panchayat projects in the productive sector, mostly agriculture and allied areas, did not show much household level impact. On the other hand, stand-alone projects in the service sector at the grama panchayat level had considerable impact.

The study also revealed that the share of productive sector in the total plan expenditure declined from the Eighth Plan to Ninth Plan and fell further sharply in the Tenth Plan.

Coordination vital

It was found that the created assets suffered from sub-optimal utilisation. This was caused by inadequate provision for maintenance of assets, lack of stakeholder participation and absence of follow-up of project execution. The operation of the Kerala model of decentralised planning has shown that coordination among individuals and institutions is important for effective planning.

There should be a mechanism to ensure that there is coordination among groups/members of panchayat raj institutions and functional linkages between different tiers of the system.

It should be seen to it that a district plan is not a simple aggregation of village plans and that inter-linkages between the plans of village and blocks are vital for an integrated district plan.

Further, appropriate guidelines should be formulated for use of allocated funds by each tier of the panchayat raj institutions.