Members of Parliament are set to get a 150% hike in their local area fund but they may lose control over administering the scheme. Chetan Chauhan reports.
Members of Parliament are set to get a 150% hike in their local area fund but they may lose control over administering the scheme.
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Finance minister Pranab Mukerjee announced a hike of MP local area development fund from Rs 2 crore to Rs 5 crore while stating the scheme was not perfect.
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The Comptroller and Auditor General has pointed out poor quality work and diversion of funds for other works as major discrepancies in administering of the scheme, which has been controversial since beginning. Mukerjee received the CAG report recently.
Left parties and some legal experts had opposed the scheme saying the MPs job is to frame laws and polices and implementing them was job of the executive. Recently, the Supreme Court upheld the scheme saying the MPs just recommend the project and does not impinge on functions of the executive.
To make the scheme in tune with court judgment, the ministry of statistics and Programme Implementation has drafted new guidelines, which ask the MPs to select a project from a shelf of projects prepared by district authority and make third party inspection and audit mandatory.
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The MPs will not be allowed to allocate projects that benefit trust or societies, where they have conflict of interest, and spending for betterment of scheduled castes and tribes is likely to be increased.
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The MPs will not be allowed to allocate projects that benefit trust or societies, where they have conflict of interest, and spending for betterment of scheduled castes and tribes is likely to be increased.
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Although Planning Commission had cited financial constraint, Mukerjee approved the hike because of overwhelming demand, which would mean additional financial burden of Rs 2,370 crore in addition to existing annual budget of Rs 1,500 crore. The MPs will be able to allocate the additional money from the financial year 2011-12.
MPs cutting across party lines welcomed the decision even though Bihar chief minister has scrapped similar scheme for legislators in the state.
"It will give an opportunity for many projects which are low in the priority of the district but are useful for the development of the area," said BJP MP Murli Manohar Joshi. HRD minister Kapil Sibal said that the decision would help the common man.
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The scheme was launched in 1993-94 with an amount of Rs 5 lakh per MP, which was increased to Rs 1 crore a year later. The last increase was of Rs 2 crore in 1998-99.
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.
