January 16, 2008	Wednesday	Muharram 06, 1429

RAWALPINDI, Jan 15: Five years after devolution of power in the country, there is still confusion regarding the roles and responsibilities of the various levels of local government and jurisdictional overlaps, said the World Bank in a recent report.

A living testimony to the observation is the long-running tussle between the Rawal Town and the Rawalpindi City District Government over who should control the sanitation staff.

Though the Rawal Town administration assumed control of nearly 300 sanitation workers against the wishes of the District Government; the sanitation situation in the Town’s limits have seen no improvement, rather have been deteriorating. The reason is alleged to be that the Rawal Town administration was using them for the election campaign of the PML-Q candidate.

There are other disputes too between the Rawal Town and the City District Government, such as over collection of commercialisation fee, building fee, birth certificate fee etc. Political rivals backing the two sides would rather fan the disputes than resolve them.

On the other hand, the World Bank suggested some general remedial measures in its report. It said new staff should be hired and practical training provided, particularly at the Tehsil Municipal Authority level. Jurisdictional overlaps should be reviewed and corrected following a systematic assessment of the administrative responsibilities at various levels of local government.

It also recommended that the transfer of resources through vertical programmes and other higher level government programmes should be discouraged and reduced, with particular attention to water and sanitation sector, which currently receives substantial transfers through members of the National Assembly and provincial assemblies and the chief minister.

The report appreciated that the delegation of power to local governments through devolution has brought decision making closer to the communities, enabling them to access government officials. This, it noted, has led to some improvements in service delivery.

Survey evidence suggests that citizens’ degree of access to their representatives has increased considerably and problems are solved relatively quickly under the new system. Priorities of the local communities were also increasingly reflected in development schemes.

However, the World Bank said participation of communities could be increased and made more effective by disseminating user-friendly guidelines for Citizen Community Boards (CCBs), and developing training programmes for council members to improve their awareness and ensuring implementation of the Local Government Ordinance (LGO) provisions for CCB funding.

It recommended that fiscal resources for rural development should be increased, particularly at local government (districts, tehsils and unions) level and efficiency of spending enhanced.

These flows should be monitored closely and renewed efforts should be made to ensure that resources reach local governments in these provinces, the bank said.

For strengthening the local government planning process and the transparency of resource allocation, the World Bank suggested that discretionary transfers’ share of total transfer should be reduced and provincial non-discretionary transfers to local government be increased more quickly than local government wage bills.