LAHORE: Senior Punjab Minister, Abdul Aleem Khan’s “ambitious” and "challenging" Local Bodies model is expected to be run with an impressive outlay of approximately Rs 140 billion, which is roughly one-third of the likely Rs 425 billion Annual Development Programme (ADP) of the province, sources divulged to the “Jang Group and Geo Television Network” Tuesday.
With an emphasis on transparent award of tenders for development projects to best bidders on basis of the past reputation and credibility of private contractors involved, scrutiny of material quality, monitoring of projects before they are completed and auditing of accounts to reduce chances of corruption and nepotism, Punjab’s new Local Bodies model is also expected to allocate Rs 50 billion to the village councils.
Though provincial governors do not normally play an active role in local bodies' as far as governance is concerned, Aleem Khan would be assisted by his long-term friend and the Governor of Punjab, Chaudhary Muhammad Sarwar, who is already on the roads planning a crackdown on human smugglers though the FIA, besides focusing energies on how to take on the people who have forcibly occupied lands and properties of Overseas Pakistanis.
Governor Sarwar would be coordinating very closely with Aleem Khan on installation of water filtration plants to particularly reduce the deaths of children resulting from water-borne diseases in deprived rural and semi-urban areas of the province.
Punjab Chief Minister, Usman Buzdar, is currently focusing on efficiency of public servants and might still a lot of time to put things in an apple-pie order. The amounts cited above would be distributed among the local councils as per their eligibility. The Mayors would be elected directly with the entire district as the Electoral College, and not the house as Premier Imran Khan has often hinted in his public speeches.
Senior Punjab Minister Aleem Khan also plans to cut down on the size of union councils that would be entrusted with the task to construct streets, drainage and street lights etc, while water supply and municipal functions will be carried out by tehsil administrations to avoid overlapping and wastage of public money.
Under the new system, the local governments in Punjab might be handed over the powers of executive magistrates to enforce local and special laws to handle profiteering, adulteration, encroachments, tampered weights and measures and recovery of municipal taxes and bills.
The Punjab local government system aims at providing infrastructure, more economic opportunities and adequate public services to a good chunk of its citizens living in rural areas, so that alarming poverty levels could be brought down.
Moreover, the new system plans to ensure the rural public’s access to clean drinking water, education, health and sanitation facilities. Basically, Punjab’s new Local Bodies model not only includes a good number of points from General Pervez Musharraf’s governance blue-print, but numerous applicable features from similar systems prevailing in India, Norway, Denmark and Sweden etc would also be part of Aleem Khan’s plans.
However, it remains to be seen if Aleem re-introduces or revives the “Panchayat Raj System,” which exists in India and is an integral part of their local governance system. The “Panchayat Raj System,” if revived, can involve people in the running of their own affairs in their respective communities.
According to the Election Commission of Pakistan, there are now approximately 7,000 local institutions of democratically constituted units of local government to which around 125,000 powerless and directionless representatives were elected a few years ago.
Research conducted by the “Jang Group and Geo Television Network” reveals that in India, there are a total of 267,428 local government bodies, of which 262,771 are rural and 4,657 urban.
There 632 are district councils, 6,672 rural local governments and 255,466 are gram panchayats at the village level. A gram panchayat is the only grassroots-level of panchayati raj formalised local self-governance system in India at the village or small-town level, and has a sarpanch (head of the village) as its elected leader.
The 2013 Local election in India had seen 37.1 per cent women councillors getting elected, and in 2015-16, the local government expenditure was 16.3 per cent of total government expenditure.
As far as the obligatory functions of Indian local bodies are concerned, these include: Supply of pure and wholesome water, construction and maintenance of public streets, lighting and watering of public streets, cleaning of public streets, places and sewers, regulation of offensive, dangerous or obnoxious trades and callings or practices, maintenance or support of public hospitals, establishment and maintenance of primary schools, registration of births and deaths, removing obstructions and projections in public streets, bridges and other places, naming streets and numbering houses.
The discretionary functions of Indian local bodies include: Laying out of areas, securing or removal of dangerous buildings or places, construction and maintenance of public parks, gardens, libraries, museums, rest houses, leper homes, orphanages and rescue homes for women, public buildings, planting of trees and maintenance of roads, housing for low income groups, conducting surveys, organizing public receptions, public exhibitions, public entertainment, provision of transport facilities with the municipality and promotion of welfare of municipal employees.
It goes without saying that some of the functions of the urban bodies overlap with the work of state agencies. And this happens everywhere in the world.
It is interesting that law has not provided Indian local bodies’ representatives with any powers directly, and has instead left it to state government discretion.
On August 27, 2018, Premier Imran Khan had stated that his political party, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, would follow the transparent governance model of Sweden, which has the lowest levels of national debt, low and stable inflation and a relatively healthy banking system among the European Union states.
Now, the model of governance in Sweden at grass-root level is the same as practiced by other Nordic countries. The Nordic countries are generally considered to refer to Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, including their associated territories like Greenland etc.
In Nordic countries, as research shows, councillors as representatives of the citizens, advocating peoples’ interest, defining needs, setting priorities and controlling implementation. The system has particularly worked in Nordic nations and has been successful at significantly reducing poverty.
It is pertinent to note that poverty in the Nordic countries isn't about lacking the basic necessities needed for a dignified life. You'll have a home, enough healthy food to eat and clothes to wear and even some things which might be classified as a luxury elsewhere such as a laptop and an internet-connection. You'll also have the same access to things like healthcare and education as wealthier citizens of these countries do.
And all this seems like a distant dream for Pakistanis though. Key reasons for low poverty rates in Nordic countries: Low unemployment rates: In Sweden, the unemployment rate has averaged 5.87 percent between 1980 and 2015. In November 2015, Sweden’s unemployment rate had declined to 6.2 percent from 6.7 percent in October, the lowest reading since August 2008, according to Trading Economics. Notably, the number of unemployed fell by 55,000 compared to the previous year.
Transparency: Nordic countries, such as Sweden, pride themselves on their honesty and transparency of their governments. In Sweden, everyone has access to all official records. Sweden’s trust for public institutions was at 55 percent compared to Russia’s 25 percent, the “Economist” magazine had reported.
Individual autonomy: Nordic countries have let go of the old social democratic consensus and presented new ideas from across the political spectrum. They continue to invest in human capital and protect people from the disruptions that are part of the capitalist system, according to “The Economist.”
According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the 2012 poverty rates for Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland had stood at 9 percent, 5.4 percent, 8.1 percent and 6.5 percent respectively. At the other end of the spectrum, Mexico had the highest poverty rate at 18.9 percent.
Exemplary public provision of welfare has thus resulted in low levels of corruption in these Nordic countries, widely deemed to be the role models when it comes to having in place some local bodies’ systems of governance.
According to Transparency International's 2016 Corruption Perception Index, Denmark had stood at Number One position, Finland was third, Sweden was four, and Norway was ranked at Number 6, and hence rated among the top 10 least corrupt of the 176 countries evaluated.
Pakistan had stood at rank number 116!
(References: The Guardian, the Financial Times, the Transparency International, the Nordic Labour Journal, the Huffington Post, the Economist, the New York Times, the CNN and the Scandinavian Journal of History etc)
Another vital point to note is that a very high percentage of workers in Nordic nations are associated with labour unions.
In 2013, labour union density was 86 percent in Iceland, 69 per cent in Finland, 68 per cent in Sweden, 67 per cent in Denmark and 52 per cent in Norway. Denmark, Finland and Sweden all have union-run unemployment funds.
The corporatist system is most extensive in Sweden and Norway, where employer federations and labor representatives bargain at the national level mediated by the government.
The labor market interventions are aimed at providing job retraining and relocation. Overall, the Nordic labor market is flexible, with laws making it easy for employers to hire and shed workers or introduce labor-saving technology.
The government labor market policies are designed to provide generous social welfare, job retraining and relocation to limit any conflicts between capital and labor that might arise from this process.
And all this leads to happiness and smiles.
Various United Nations’ World Happiness Reports show that the happiest nations are concentrated in Northern Europe. The Nordic countries are ranked highest on the metrics of real GDP per capita, healthy life expectancy, having someone to count on, perceived freedom to make life choices, generosity and freedom from corruption.
The World Happiness Report 2018 had placed the Nordic countries place among the Top 10, with Finland and Norway clinching the top spots.
Talking about the Tax-to-GDP ratios, the citizens of these Nordic countries pay very high taxes, which—in turn—guarantee their welfare. In Denmark, the current Tax-to-GDP ratio is 50.8 per cent, it is 54.8 per cent in Norway, 49.8 per cent in Sweden and 54.2 per cent in Finland.
