LAHORE, Aug 27: Creation of a community development department to ensure creation of citizen community boards and establishment of an inspection wing in the local government commission are the main features of a plan to reconstruct the provincial local government department to fill the post-devolution governance gaps.

The plan has been submitted to Chief Secretary Salman Siddique who has been directed by Chief Minister Pervaiz Elahi to restructure all government departments to improve governance in the province, official sources informed Dawn on Sunday.

According to them, the need for restructuring the local government department had been felt in view of its massive responsibility of looking after independent district governments in the province and to ensure compatibility of their functioning with that of the provincial government policies.

The first proposal regarding the establishment of an inspection wing in the all-powerful but organisationally weak local government wing is to develop a sort of stethoscope with which the provincial government could know weaknesses and problems of every district government. Right now there is no inspection system in the province which is allowing problems and disputes to grow in the local bodies.

Regulation of taxation and budget, and resolution of disputes through regular inspections of local bodies was the responsibility of the local government commission, headed by Local Government Minister Muhammad Basharat Raja, but it had no staff and proper secretariat to discharge the responsibility. As a result, every local council was imposing taxes at will, making or spending budgets without any guidance or supervision, the officials said.

The government, too, was required to constitute monitoring committees for the local councils which also had not been formed.

The officials said the local government had staff which used to inspect district councils and municipal corporations before the introduction of the new local government system. They were still on the government payroll but doing nothing.

Now, according to the proposal, the staff could be posted in the inspection wing of the local government commission. Their job would be to check every local council and report to the commission at the provincial level for necessary action.

The second proposal was the creation of the community development department to ensure the formation of CCBs whose basic aim was to include non-elected people in the development process of their own localities.

Punjab had been able to constitute only 8,562 CCBs but every local council was earmarking a sizable amount for them in their every annual budget in accordance with the local government ordinance, accumulating an unutilised over Rs5 billion.

The officials said the Punjab government had appointed deputy district officers (community development) in every district to look after the CCBs but there was no organisational set-up to regulate their working. The new department, if established, would not only provide them with organisational back-up but also ensure the creation of CCBs and ultimately the utilisation of huge funds meant for development at the local level through them.