Abolish the LAD Funds
There has been widespread criticism of the bottlenecks and bureaucratic red
tape that is creating hurdles to the utilization of the Local Area Development
(LAD) funds of the MLAs of Asom. This criticism is not just confined to one
political party but cuts across all party lines because huge sums of the MLALAD
funds have remained unutilized, and the State government is thinking of
confiscating the unused funds since MLALAD funds are paid out of the exchequer.
One feels tempted to regard this as a fair decision, but the equations are not
as simple and straightforward as they might appear to be on the surface. It
might, therefore, make better sense to look a little more closely at whether
the MPLAD and the MLALAD funds were such a good idea after all and whether the
whole scheme should be retained or abolished.
The most common criticism of the MLALAD fund has been that despite the
submission of schemes within a month of the allotment of funds by the
government, very little is done towards the implementation of the schemes by
the officers concerned. There are MLAs who complain that they submitted their
schemes within a month of the allotment of funds, but nothing was done towards
the implementation of the schemes. There are complaints that the formalities
involved are very complicated and that the bureaucratic red tape is much worse
at the time of the release of the second instalment of the funds. The district
authorities, on their part, express their inability to monitor the schemes
expeditiously due to shortage of manpower. This is a very legitimate
difficulty, considering that much of the district administrations time is
taken up with law-and-order duties created by politicians. As for complaints
that there are too many formalities related to the scheme, some of these
so-called
formalities work as useful checks and balances in a corruption-ridden country.
And who are the people complaining about formalities? They are politicians who
want no paperwork at all, and expect things to happen solely on verbal orders.
All said and done, the MPLAD and MLALAD programmes do little more than stoking
corruption. What is worse, once our legislators have had a taste of something
like this loaded with the potential of enhancing personal wealth by investing
public money, they are naturally loath to give it up. Think of the provision
made in the Constitution of India for reservations for SCs and STs for a period
of ten years. Our lawmakers have not just extended the provisions and
perpetuated them, but even amended the Constitution to ensure that reservations
remain a permanent feature of our polity. There are other important reasons why
the MPLAD and MLALAD schemes should go. First, the schemes make development a
rather whimsical, arbitrary and subjective business and gear it exclusively to
the needs of vote catching. They take development away from the neediest
sections of society. Such funds are often wasted on redundant pavilions and
arches when there are far more deserving causes. Besides,
they encourage every State to increase its population, since more people means
more legislators and more funds for such schemes. So a part of the funds
earmarked for development goes to States that already have more funds than the
smaller or the peripheral States that can never get the same scale of funding
because they have fewer representatives. The MPLAD and the MLALAD schemes have
not worked well, and must be abolished forthwith to save further losses to the
exchequer.
(The Sentinel,17.10.2007)
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