An effort by the Ministry of Local Government, Rural Development and Cooperatives (LGRD) to strengthen local government by mandating the creation of 13 standing committees in each union parishad (UP) has proven ineffectual.
Local sources said the committees had been mandated to deal with a comprehensive range of matters from taxation to audits to family dispute resolution.
Mirroring national government on a smaller scale, standing committees consider issues of local importance and provide recommendations to union parishads, much like parliamentary committees do for parliament.
The local government, however, does not wield the fiscal power that parliament enjoys. Insiders in local government have complained that funding issues have weakened the initiative. But ordinary citizens said they hadn’t heard about the committees or that they had heard of them, but that they did not meet.
In a tour of several Moulvibazar sadar unions, the Dhaka Tribune found that standing committees usually did not meet and, in any case, standing committees made recommendations according to the wishes of the UP chairman.
Several UP chairmen, on condition of anonymity, admitted that the system was not working. They said more financial support from the government was needed to empower the UPs do their job better.
Mizanur Rahman, who works as divisional coordinator for Sylhet for Mass-line Media Centre, an NGO that works extensively with local government, said introducing the standing committees was a good thing. “If standing committees were made more functional, the UPs capacity to provide services would be enhanced,” he said.
Common people said they did not know about the union parishad’s standing committees. When contacted, many people, including Iqbal Ahmed and Mahmud Miah of Momrujpur village and Mohsin Murad of Sathal, said they did not know such committees existed.
UP chairmen of different union parishads in Moulvibazar sadar upazila including Raja Miah of Akhail Kura, Musarof Husen Badsha of Chadnighat and Sujit Kumar Das of Amtail said standing committees could help develop union parishad operations and services. But they said it was difficult to implement recommendations made by standing committees because union parishads did not have the financial ability to do so.
An October 2009 gazette notification ordered each of the country’s 4,550 union parishads to set up 13 standing committees, composed of 5 to 7 members presided over by an elected member of the UP. The notification required that one-third of the presidents of the standing committees be women, and that meetings be convened every two months.
The committees were set up for finance and establishment; accounts and audit; taxes and collection; education, health and family planning; agriculture, fisheries and livestock; village infrastructural development and maintenance; law and order; birth and death registration; sanitation, water supply and sewerage; social welfare and disaster management; environment and forestation; family dispute arbitration and women’s and children’s welfare; and culture and sports.
The provision requires that recommendations of the standing committees be placed before the UPs for consideration and that UP authorities had to respond in writing about recommendations it had not accepted.
