Kerala
had very little experience in decentralised Planning. Of course, numerous
attempts for the setting up of a decentralised Planning structure were made
during the past four decades: District Development Councils (DDC) in 1960s,
District Planning offices in 1970s, preparation of Special Component Plans and
Tribal Sub Plan at the district level in 1980s, and unsuccessful
decentralisation of the first year annual Plan (1990-'91) of the Eighth
Five-year Plan. District Planning offices with hardly any direct involvement in
Plan formulation and implementation have been functioning more or less as
monitoring bodies. Decentralisation
of SC/ST programmes has, in practice, meant delegation of administrative powers
to district level departmental offices, with no involvement of people at the
local level. In the early 1990s,
the government made an attempt to partially decentralise the preparation and
implementation of the Eighth Five-Year Plan.
District Development Councils (DDCs), which were nominated bodies,
entrusted primarily with the task of monitoring and reviewing the progress of
Plan schemes implemented in the district, were directed to prepare district
Plans by integrating district-level Plans formulated by them with the block
level Plans prepared by the Block-Level Planning Committees in consultation with
the village panchayats. Very few
districts did so; integration was poor and the proposals received from the lower
levels were only mere reformulation of the ongoing departmental schemes.
The Eighth Plan document of the State had identified district sector
schemes involving 24 per cent of the annual Plan outlay for 1990-'91 and village
sector schemes involving another 5.6 per cent; 2.35 per cent of the outlay was
contributed to the village panchayats as untied funds. The whole exercise
returned to square one when the line departments themselves implemented the
entire programme.
It is against this backdrop that the decision of the Kerala Government to launch the Ninth Five-Year Plan of the State as a democratically decentralised People's Plan by devolving 35-40 per cent of the State's annual Plan outlay for 1997-'98 to the three-tier Panchayat Raj institutions (PRIs) was widely hailed as a bold and historic step. It was bold in the sense that it could break the high level bureaucratic barrier to decentralisation. It was also historic as Kerala was the first State in the past 45 years of the Planning history of the country to venture into a genuine democratic decentralisation of Planning making use of the new institutional system empowerment by the Panchayat Raj Act, 1994. Dissentients were, of course, who suspected that this was a surreptitious move by the ruling party (Left Democratic Front) to enlarge its vote banks by siphoning out public funds for distribution among them as largesse.
Some
quarters had aired the cynical view that nothing of this innovative sort would
work in the State. But these initial dissenting voices were too feeble to be
impressive. Intensive campaign with
an alluring motto: 'power to the people' backed by high voltage media publicity
and overt support of voluntary organisations like Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad (Kerala Scientific Literature Society) and
Literacy Mission, generated a lot of enthusiasm among the people, particularly
in rural areas, cutting across party lines. About Rs 750 crore of the State's
annual Plan fund was allocated to local-level Panchayat Raj Institutions (PRIs)
- Corporations, Municipalities and Grama Panchayats - pro-rata, based on the
population criterion. These PRIs, already empowered under the Panchayat Raj Act,
1994, were given freedom, of course within certain parameters set by national
and state level sectoral priorities and some operational guidelines issued by
the State Planning Board (SPB), to formulate and implement their own development
programmes. Necessary back-up support in the form of training of personnel,
technical consultancy, and publicity, was provided extensively by the State
Planning Board, which spearheaded the campaign.
But the magnitude of the task was so huge that most of the local bodies,
severely constrained by time and manpower resources could not complete the work
of implementing their annual Plans before the end of the financial year on March
31; the government had to extend, therefore, the time limit for spending the
Plan funds for 1997-'98 up to the end of June 1998.
Being
new to the job, the Panchayat Committees took time to organise the preparation
of the annual Plans and project reports of the programmes included in the Plan.
Project-reports were prepared in a hurry by the members of Task Forces, who were
technical experts and presented for approval so late that neither the Block
Level Expert Committee (BLEC) nor the District Planning Committee (DPC) could,
apply, for obvious reasons, their minds and appraise them for their economic
viability and local specificity before giving approval.
Once
the local bodies set themselves to the task of actual implementation of their
annual Plans, frictions started to crop up. Allegations about politicisation of
the programme, corruption, nepotism, wastage, misuse, and even swindling of
public funds were raised widely by the public, political parties, and the media.
Some of these allegations might be true; some might be motivated overshoot.
Given the existing social and political structure and value system of our
society, some flaws and leakage in any development programme centralised or
decentralised - are bound to occur and taken for granted. Is the Kerala model of
decentralised Planning inherently more prone to politicisation, corruption, and
leakage of funds than the conventional, centralised Planning?
If not, where has the programme, conceptually well accepted as an ideal
development strategy, gone awry? Our
study though confined to a very limited sample of two Grama Panchayats out of
990 in the State addresses itself to these and other related issues and attempts
to examine their validity.
Subjective
views and opinions of the people of the panchayats, belonging to both categories
- beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries - about People’s Planning in general
as revealed by the sample survey are the following:
1 The majority of the non-beneficiaries (51 per cent in Vithura
and 53 per cent in Nanniyode) expressed the view that the functioning of the
Grama Sabha has been helpful for the development of their respective wards.
2. Seventyone per cent of the non-beneficiaries in Nanniyode(23 per cent of them belonging to the ruling party) think that the ongoing People’s Plan programmes may help the development of their wards, but only 29 per cent (17 per cent of them belonging to the ruling party) of the non-beneficiaries in Vithura hold this view.
3. Twentyone per cent of the sample beneficiaries in Vithura (12 per cent belonging to the ruling party) and 18 per cent in Nanniyode (6 per cent belonging to the ruling party) stated that they know of cases where persons have been selected as beneficiaries in violation of the norms on political, personal and other considerations. Six per cent of them in Vithura and 8 per cent in Nanniyode stated that such irregular selections were due to political pressure. Among the non-beneficiaries, 26 per cent in Vithura (14 percent belonging to ruling party) and 56 per cent in Nanniyode (18 per cent belonging to ruling party) stated that there were irregularities in the selection of beneficiaries.
* N. D. Gopinathan Nair was formerly in the Indian Economic Services and retired as Additional Economic Advisor, Ministry of Finance, Government of India.