PESHAWAR, Jan 23: With the Nazim of the Peshawar City district government expressing ignorance about existence of citizen community boards in local areas under his jurisdiction , most of the union councils in the provincial metropolis have not formed these boards in violation of the Local Government Ordinance (LGO), 2001.
Under Section 98 of the LGO, 2001, every local area - including union council, tehsil/town and district - are required to form citizen community boards to carry out specific prescribed development schemes and improve services delivery and side-by- side performing a host of activities for improvement at the grass roots level.
However, more than two-and-a-half years have passed since the LGO, 2001 was activated but the boards have yet to be formed as a majority of the union councils have not formed the boards in clear violation of the LGO order.
Nazim of the Peshawar city district government Azam Afridi, when contacted by Dawn, expressed his ignorance about the formation of the boards or CCBs, short for citizen community boards.
"I just know that CCBs have yet to become effective," said Mr Afridi, adding that "our CCB has not yet become functional because we did not have funds for the same".
He also said that as the district had recently received funds for the CCBs the same entities would be set in place and these would start performing their due role as enshrined under the LGO, 2001.
The naib nazim of the Peshawar city district, Iqbal Khalil, who is responsible to look after the formation and other affairs of CCBs, when approached, said that out of 92 union councils of the city district only 12 had formed the CCBs.
"The remaining union councils have yet to form CCBs," said Mr Khalil. The obligation of forming CCBs, added Mr Khalil, could not be fulfilled because the Peshawar city district government had recently received development funds for the current financial year.
In line with the Provincial Finance Commission (PFC), every district government is required to divert 25 per cent of its total annual developmental funds to the CCBs which have been assigned a specific role to carry out development schemes at the grass root level through community involvement.
The work assigned to the boards, under the LGO rules include improvement of delivery of service by a public facility; development and management of a new public facility; welfare of the handicapped, destitute, widows and families in extreme poverty; establishment of farming, marketing and consumers' cooperatives; identification of development and municipal needs and mobilisation of resources; formation of stakeholder associations for community involvement in the improvement and maintenance of specific facilities and reinforcing the capacity of a specific monitoring committee at the behest of the concerned council (union council, tehsil council, town council or district council).
Haroon Bilour, nazim of Town-1 of the Peshawar city district government conceded that out of the union councils falling under his area of jurisdiction very few had set up CCBs. However, he claimed that his town happened to be the only one - among the four towns in Peshawar city district has - where CCB (at the town level) had been constituted, though it could not become functional because of non-availability of resources and due to some technical and procedural hindrances.