Recouping public money: claiming participation, Nepal

A peoples story from Nepal 

In the Banke district of Nepal, village groups overseeing the accounts of Channahwa’s Nepal Rashtriya Primary School claimed back NPR 4500 from the school management committee members.

They had pocketed this money from a sale of teak tree on the school compound.

Similarly in Bankatti village of the province, another monitoring group caught the village development society (VDC) secretary, who on behalf of the VDC had  tendered 46 teak trees for NPR 2,30,000/- . He had showed the final settlement of NPR 1,20,000, pocketing the remaining NPR 1,10,000/-. The VDC secretary had tendered a public apology and a final decision on next steps was being deliberated.  

Sthaniya Swarojgar Kendra & Center for Social Development and Research, local organisations of Nepal, have been working with the tools of economic literacy and budget accountability for governance (ELBAG). They have been supporting the orientation of community on local municipality budgets and budget accountability on several issues, primary among them being the appropriateness of budget in terms of its focus to poor people and particular social groups and in terms of transparency and integrity of implementation. In the last seven months several community groups have been supported to analyse local budgets and anomalies and irregularities. These groups comprise of Village Development Committee members, School committee members and representatives of political parties, with encouragement being given especially to women.  

Building an understanding of the processes of economic decision making in their own units of local governance people are organizing to their way to push for a ‘substantive’ participation from a ‘formal’ one. The Ratnanagar Municipality has for instance now passed a resolution of setting up a procurement committee. Final payments are done after social audits, and a complaint mechanism has also been strengthened. These peoples groups, getting organised around economic literacy and budget accountability for governance (elbag) work, apart from recouping stolen public funds, influencing VDC and other development spending towards the poor and their priorities has made the people more watchful and encouraged them to take their measures on all development works. In Padampur and in Jutepani villages, for instance, the groups have asked for VDC budgets to be made public, and also details of budget allocation by wards, and have been raising the political question of who benefits? In Jutepani, the VDC council invited the ELBAG group to participate in the budget and implementation discussions, and groups were successful in influencing the priorities on access road and drinking water for the benefit of poor. Similarly in Jutepani village priority has been given to landless community members in allocating funds for public land development works. In Padampur village social audits of deep boring scheme and analysis of income-expenditure statements of VDC led to discovery of missing NPR 35,000/- from the VDC funds. Some villages came together to review the programmes implemented by VDC and other agencies from the resources of TAAL (terrain land and irrigation programme). In one of these NPR 20 lac schemes (where communities had contributed NPR 14 lacs by the way of labour) NPR 1.48 lacs has been unaccounted for. The president of this group has been held accountable and NPR 11,000 have been recovered thus far. It is a work in progress, with only the first steps undertaken. Systematization of efforts, and promoting methodologies to develop processes of participatory budgeting are the next priorities of organization and its community facilitators in Chitwan.

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The international ELBAG practitioners meet held in India early this year saw an active participation from Nepal. Taking it further, groups including Sthaniya Swarojgar Kendra & Center for Social Development and Research decided to use the tool of ELBA in the field to work on issues of accountability and transparency.