NEWS
AND FEATURES ON THE SOLIDARITY 2000 CAMPAIGN IN COPENHAGEN
Nepal
Nepal
Rich-Poor
Gulf Stays, Despite Big Spending
Power to the People
By Suman Pradhan
GOKARNA, Nepal, June 2000 (IPS)- Taking a walk down this village on the north-eastern outskirts of Nepal's Kathmandu Valley, it is quite evident that Gokarna is different from the rest of the countryside in one of the world's poorest nations.
Unlike in thousands of Nepali villages, its about 1,200 residents get a regular supply of drinking water and electricity, send their children to schools that function regularly and get treated by qualified doctors in a well-equipped health clinic.
The general environment of the village is clean, with well kept drains and proper toilets. A metalled road runs past the village linking it to the national capital. Facilities like these are rare for most villages in Nepal and have been made possible, but not by special government attention to Gorkana. Rather, it is the effort of the inhabitants themselves that has transformed a once neglected hamlet into a model for rural development.
Gokarna owes its well-being to Kathmandu's garbage which is dumped here, but for a sizeable sum paid to the village by civic authorities in the capital city. However, the trucks that bring in Kathmandu's rubbish every day, dump it at a site hidden from view behind small hillocks.
Thanks to a government law enacted two years ago by Parliament, the residents of Gokarana now have their own administration that can speak with central authorities on the people's behalf. This is how the residents were able to strike a deal with Kathmandu municipal authorities for accepting the capital city's garbage.
It has been estimated that this way Gokarna earns more than 10,000 rupees (nearly 150 U.S. dollars) for each of its residents every year. This is ten times as much as what the government spends on average on each village in the country under its rural development budget.
However, the people of Gokarna, through their own elected body, deal with the Ministry for Local Development for the funds and expertise to carry out a variety of development schemes. "Our village is a shining example of empowerment," says Surendra Phuyal, a former Gokarna resident who now works in the capital city.
"While other villages are still talking about getting more power, our villagers are practising it to great effect," he adds. Rural development experts often cite the example of Gokarna to back their case that villagers in this mainly rural nation should be able to take their own decisions on matters that affect their daily lives.
"It is truly amazing what Nepal has accomplished in terms of decentralisation in these 10 years of democracy," says Chaitanya Mishra, a social scientist at Kathmandu's Tribhuvan University. One of the outcomes of the successful 1990 pro-democracy popular uprising in the Himalayan kingdom has been a new push to devolve power down to the lowest level.
As a result, in 1998, parliament enacted the Local Self-Government Act, which for the first time gave real power to the elected village, district and municipal councils. That act was only recently signed into law by the constitutional monarch, King Birendra.
The law gives authority to elected village and town councils to tax and spend. The main objective of the legislation is to tackle rural poverty by giving people a say in decision making about their well-being. In enacting the legislation, Nepal was also keeping its pledge at the 1995 World Summit on Social Development to ''create an economic, political, social, cultural and legal environment that will enable people to achieve social development.
'' The Summit marked the highest level global political commitment to eradicate poverty, joblessness and social tensions in the world's nations. However, critics point out that the law to decentralise governance in Nepal seems to have remained on paper, barring exceptions like Gokarna.
"Our structure in this regard is one of the best in the region. But despite all that, the mindset is the same. It will take some time before we can talk about real self-government," says Mishra, who also works as advisor to Nepal office of the Danish Association for International Cooperation (MS).
The local self-government law is yet to be properly implemented because local bodies still have to be trained on how to run themselves. According to Deputy Prime Minister Ram Chandra Paudel, who also holds the local development portfolio charged with implementing the law: "Before we can implement the laws, we have to train the village and district bodies how to use those laws to their advantage."
So far, only 24 of the 75 administrative districts in Nepal, have undergone that training, he said. Another problem is that the devolution of powers as envisaged in the laws are so far confined to only electoral politics.
While most Nepalis take enthusiastic part in parliament elections to choose their national leaders, very few have any real voice in decisions that affect their daily life. "While many laws have been enacted and even elections held for the local bodies at the village and district levels, very little has been done to respect and enforce local autonomy," says Devendra Raj Panday, a former government minister who now runs Nepal South Asia Centre, a research body in Kathmandu.
The UNDP Human Development Report too notes that decentralisation has not been effective in Nepal because most powers are still to be devolved.
"The tradition has been that most powers and functions which are decentralised, also remain with the centre," says the report that was published in 1998. The new law seems not to have made much difference because decentralisation is still stopping at the district level, and powers only being given to the elected district councils.
These bodies are responsible for coordinating all development activities within a district that is quite large in area and may include hundreds of villages. "Everything stops at the district level," says Mishra. "That should not be the case.
Powers should devolve down to the villages, and from there to the wards and the people. District councils are too distant from the people. It is needed only as a coordinating mechanism," he says.