Raj Karan Mahato | Janakpur

 

The Ministry of Industry, Commerce and Supplies, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Law, the Ministry of Social Development and the Secretariat of Provincial Assembly do not have sec­retaries. New bureaucrats have not replaced the ones who have been transferred elsewhere, posing a serious problem. Of the 48 positions in the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Planning, 23 are vacant. Mukti Acharya, Secretary at the ministry, is taking man­datory retirement, but his replacement Prem Kumar Shrestha has not arrived yet. Similarly, Jagdish Regmi, Sec­retary at the Ministry of Inter­nal Affairs and Law, retired on April 10.

 

Deputy Secretary Rohit Dahal and Arjun Lama were transferred seven months ago but no one has replaced them. Deputy secretary Arun Jha has been appointed acting chief secretary. On top of that, bureaucrats in this ministry have not received their sal­ary for the past one and half months.

 

On March 13, the federal council of ministers decided to send five secretaries to Province 2. However only the secretary at the Ministry of Physical Infrastructure and Transport, Pushkar Ghimire, has joined office. The fed­eral government has recently signed off on the appointment of two secretaries—Shankar Subedi and Sushil Dhakal—but they are yet to arrive.

 

 "Monsoon is fast approaching, but we have not been able to make a disaster management action plan"

Hem Bahadur Karki, a section officer in the disaster management unit

 

Saroj Singh, the provincial Minister of Internal Affairs and Law, has accused the federal government of sending only those bureaucrats who are on the verge of retirement. “They come here as if they are on a vacation,” he says.

 

The budget allocated for the current fiscal is Rs 29.78 billion. The size of the cap­ital budget is over Rs 14.96 billion. However, the pace of development expenditure is slow, making a budget freeze increasingly likely. The gov­ernment has not been able to spend on areas other than transport and office manage­ment. Even though good poli­cies and programs have been introduced, there are prob­lems in implementation.

 

Hem Bahadur Karki, a sec­tion officer in the disaster management unit at the pro­vincial Internal Affairs and Law Ministry, says that proj­ects cannot be implemented due to a lack of manpower. “Monsoon is fast approaching, but we have not been able to make a disaster management action plan.”

 

A public housing project to be implemented by the pro­vincial Ministry of Physical Infrastructure and Transport is also stuck in limbo for lack of human resources. As many as 18 positions in this ministry remain vacant.

 

The government has not been able to keep its prom­ise of providing housing for the poor. Jitendra Sonal, the provincial Minister of Phys­ical Infrastructure, says Rs 1 billion has been allocated for this project. But although the money is there, work is stagnant.

 

There are 163 offices under the jurisdiction of the Prov­ince 2 government, which has requested a total of 4,937 bureaucrats. But the federal government has approved only 3,208 positions.