CHALLENGES AHEAD
CHALLENGES
AHEAD
Nepal is in the final stage of
entering into the federal structure after holding three tiers of elections. Major
parties have almost completed nomination of their candidates for the National
Assembly. Once the National Assembly elections are held on February 7, the new
government likely to be led by the UML boss K.P.Oli will run the country for
the next five years. In the mean time, people are closely watching the progress
on the unification of the UML and CPN-Maoist Centre as announced by them just
before the provincial and federal level elections.
There seems to be a number of
challenges in the days to come for the new government concerning the
operational arrangements of the local level and provincial governments. The
devolution of power and authorities from the centre to the local and provincial
government will gradually take place in line with the federal structure.
Confusions about the operational management of human resources, development and
sectoral programmes management, budgetary provisions, natural resource
management, management of security forces and so on, will prevail for some time
once the centre starts transferring its authorities to the local level and
provincial governments.
Closely looking at this
situation, the path to the federalism for Nepal does not seem to be easy in the
days to come. It seems that the big three and their governments did not seem to
have done enough homework in the last two and half years after the promulgation
of new constitution with regard to proper functioning of federalism. For
example, school education has come under the jurisdiction of local government
in accordance with the federal structure. Until now, nothing concrete has been
done in this regard due to lack of clear policy and guidelines except providing
salaries to the teachers and staff of the public schools. It has been high time
for the central government to immediately engage educational experts to draft
the necessary policy and guidelines in close collaboration with local level
representatives to pave the way for the implementation of local level education
system as envisaged in the new federal structure from the beginning of new
school session.
Rai
Biren Bangdel
Maharajgunj
