The budget, which has been proposed by Mr. M. Saifur Rahman, has allocated only 15 crore Taka for union, the primary and vital local government institution. However, each union has average 20 thousand people. The point here is: how much money from the amount will benefit them.

Local government is the most important tool to reach people with national resources. We supposed to have elected Pouroshava representatives, Upazilla representatives, but we don’t have them. National resources can be allocated to people well through the system of decentralization. It has been said that the more national resources go to the hands of people efficiently, the more development  will take place.

Last year, the allocation for pourashava was 150 crore Taka. This year it is reduced to  100 crore Taka. On the other hand, our union parishad allocation has been increased to 180 crore Taka from last fiscal year’s 120 crore Taka compared to revised ADP. The money which will be  used in the grassroot levels : 180 crore Taka for union parishad and 100 crore Taka for pourashava. That means, in total, it is 280 crore Taka for grassroot level local government. In other words, the government has allocated only 280 crore Taka for 4,600 union parishads, grossly said.

The government has increased allocation for village government to 61 crore Taka from 60 crore Taka in 2005-2006 fiscal year budget. The government is patronizing it as a constitutionalized institution. Although this is not a constitutionalized institution.
The govt. has allocated 100 crore Taka for city corporation just like the previous budget. Also, there is no change in the budget of Zilla Parishad. It had an allocation of  124 crore in the last budget and the same amount has been proposed in the new budget too.

Now we have 3 levels of local governments : union parishad, pouroshava and city corporation. We can add upazilla too. In the last fiscal, there was an allocation of Tk.520 crore for these levels in the revised ADP. The amount was approximately 2.5% of ADP. This year the allocation has been reduced by 2.08%. interestingly, local government is a prioritized sector in PRSP.
We can alleviate poverty by transferring adequate amount of national resources to local governments, by empowering them more and more and through more allocation. But none of these have been reflected in the proposed budget. In fact, the policy-makers don’t even read PRSP. All they do is to add, to subtract, to divide and to multiply some numbers. They only think of which interest groups should be pleased /awarded. In fact, PRSP won’t alleviate poverty. Because it is based on words and tricks only. What need to be done is : the government has to change their policies to establish tranperency, accountability, to curb corruption, to reduce the income parity between the rich and the poor. Same drink is getting served in the new bottle over and over again. But the government needs to go beyond the words of budget. The budget has to be pro-people. In addition, new methods need to be applied in favor of people. We need to establish good governance in politics, in administration and in economy. Whome to be taxed at what rate, how much money will be  allocated and in whch sector--- are these formulated to reduce income parity? The budget should not be formulated to benefit the special interest groups, it should be directed to bring public welfare, to benefit the common people.

We have another serious problem with implementation of projects efficiently. This trend has been reflected in every year’s ADP. All decisions are taken centrally. Due to this trend, projects are not getting implemented efficiently. So we need to implement projects through decentralization. It means strengthening of all levels of local governments. Trickle down effect did not work anywhere. It didn’t benefit the poor. Rather it benefited the rich and the powerful.

We have to choose and implement projects through new methodology and all these have to be pro-people. Everything should be viewd from new point of view.
World Bank’s project with local government can be a success if the grassroot government gets more autonomy, more power and more allocation. They can not be controlled. They should be independent to  implement their own projects, with adequate allocation for them.