May 29, 2008	Thursday	Jamadi-ul-Awwal 23, 1429

LAHORE, May 28: All provincial governments, including Punjab, are going to challenge the very existence of the National Reconstruction Bureau (NRB), holding it responsible for destroying the administrative system in the country.

The NRB is meeting representatives of all the provincial governments in Islamabad on Thursday (today) for the first time since its formation after the Feb 18 general elections.

“We are not going to present any proposal to the NRB, and will instead question its very locus standi because we think it is an illegal body,” a senior official of the Punjab government told Dawn here on Wednesday.

He said besides questioning the legality of the NRB, the provinces would also express their reservations about the Local Government Ordinance and the Police Order, which the bureau had crafted.

“No province wants both the laws and the systems under them. And they are going to tell this to the NRB,” he said.

The official said the provinces were going to tell the NRB chairman that the body was unconstitutional, and according to the rules of business, its functions should have been performed either by the Cabinet Division or the Inter-provincial Coordination Council (IPCC).

Under the 1973 Constitution, law and order and local governments were provincial subjects whereas these were handled by the NRB without any legal or constitutional authorisation. It was merely a federal government body, which could not perform the functions it dealt with under the Constitution.

The official said the former provincial governments too had abdicated their constitutional authority (of handling on their own the two provincial matters) by agreeing to hand them over to the NRB. The fact was that they could not do this again according to the Constitution.

“The NRB is a committee. Committees are formed just to make recommendations about national issues. And they cannot themselves make laws which is the sole right of the parliament and provincial assemblies which are elected by the people,” he said.He said the provinces were going to tell the NRB that the then federal government had not even fully introduced the devolution system through it. And by doing so, it had also violated the 1973 Constitution according to which the federal government was required to devolve its major functions to provinces, or at least stop dealing with affairs which the provinces were already handling.

The NRB did not abolish the federal health, education, food and agriculture ministries, which the provinces already had. At the best, it could form a food security policy, allowing the provincial food departments to tackle the subject independently.Instead of doing it, the NRB transferred authority of the provincial governments to districts by exercising their ‘constitutional’ right. “The Local Government Ordinance is a federal law under which provincial powers have been delegated to the districts without any reason,” the official opined.

He said under Articles 146 and 147 of the Constitution, the federal and the provincial governments could delegate their authority to each other only through elected parliament. And the authority could not be delegated to any non-elected body like the NRB. If the assemblies were not in session, the matter of delegating the powers could be taken up by the cabinets, but still needing to get a ratification ultimately by the parliament.

“The basic aim of the think tank made by the non-elected people was just to destroy the administrative structure in the provinces. Right now, there is no mechanism to check price-hike, control police and even patwaris about whom we receive over 90 per cent complaints, only because of the two laws given by the NRB,” the official said.

He also said that both the new laws had not only multiplied problems but also swelled the size of the government and its non-development budget by 400 per cent.