MAKING IT FAIR
When Assia Begum, the wife of a poor landless farmer, received Tk 300 from the Union Parishad office she became quite surprised. At first she thought she was mistakenly given the money. Suddenly she realised that almost two years ago when she conceived her first child she applied for the government's maternity allowance for the poor pregnant mother through the Union Parishad office. As her husband had no steady income, she sometimes had to starve, making her baby vulnerable to malnutrition and disability.
But thanks to the bureaucratic tangles of our country's government offices, when the fund finally reached Assia after getting stamps of approval from thousands of tables in hundreds of offices, her son is already two years old. Assia's is a simple but factual example of how our rights are being violated only because of the intensely centralised governance.
Poor governance is actually a by-product of the highly centralised yearly budget which requires that the local government will receive the fund after it is issued by the ministerial offices in Dhaka. So no matter how small the amount of work or fund is and whether the work is in Panchagar of far north or in Teknaf of our southern tip, we have to wait for permission from Dhaka.
Many civil rights movements of Bangladesh have been working to change this stagnant system by pressurising the government to come up with a more people oriented budget. AR Aaman, secretary of one such civil rights organisation called Democratic Budget Movement says, “The government and its budget are highly centralised. The Decision has to come from the capital even to build a road or to develop a hospital in a remote village. If the local administration at district, upazila and union level can be financially empowered, stagnancy in development will be solved much more easily.”
But the dream of financially empowering local government or allowing them to submit their consent in budget development is a far cry. In Bangladesh the ministry of finance enjoys the sole authority to prepare the annual budget. Even by the constitutional provision, there is no chance for parliamentary standing committees to incorporate their recommendations in the budget. As a result, in a democratic country like Bangladesh, there is almost no scope for the representation of people's demand in the government budget.
During the budget for the fiscal year 2009-10 which was the first budget of the then Mohajot government, the Finance Minister A M A Muhith who is also the current Finance Minister said in his budget speech, “We prepare the national budget in a centralised manner. Demands of people from district or rural level don't reflect in this budget. We cannot say how much money we spend in a particular district (Budget Speech-2009-10, page-22).” At that time the honourable minister made a promise to prepare a district budget in the next year to decentralise the government's authority by empowering the local government. But it took another five years to fulfil the promise and the first district based budget was prepared in 2013 for Tangail. In the budget of 2014-15 fiscal year, the budget of another six divisional districts has been published.
But did this district budget reflect the people's demand as hoped earlier? Monower Mostafa, the member of the steering committee of Democratic Budget Movement says, “We should notice that it is not actually 'district budget'. It is called 'district based budget'. In this budget the government only shows how much money it will spend in a particular district in one year. It's like an information brochure of the government's fund allocation for a particular district. Before preparing the district based budget the government didn't take into consideration the needs and demands of the unions and upazilas. So ultimately this district based budget neither helps to empower the local government nor does it help to decentralise the process.”
Another feature of the national budget is that from the very beginning our government has been preparing sector-based budget such as budget for health sector, road sector etc. But civil rights movement like Democratic Budget Movement has been suggesting that the budget should be on the basis of regional needs and demands. This kind of sector based budget actually fails to decrease the developmental discrimination. In a research of Democratic Budget Movement it has been found that during the 2008-09 fiscal year the annual development budget was Tk 19,500 crore. The fund allocation per person is Tk 1300. But during that fiscal year fund allocation per person in Thakurgaon district was only Tk 290, in Mymensingh it was Tk 390.
On the other hand in more developed cities like Dhaka and Chittagong it was quite higher. In Dhaka fund allocation per person from the development budget was Tk 710 and in Chittagong it was Tk 850. So it is evident that this system of preparing national budget has been created a sense of discrimination in the distribution of resources which is one of the main obstacles for development. Since this system of budget has been promoting accumulation of resources in the capital and developed regions, the process of decentralisation is quite impossible with the sector based national budgetary system.
So the civil rights initiatives such as Democratic Budget Movement have been demanding region based budget which will empower local government and will decentralise the entire system. Aman says, “We want people's participation in budget. Currently the union parishads and the members of municipalities of districts and upazilas have no say in the national budget or in the recent district based budgets. Currently in some areas, these local government bodies have prepared and implemented their own budget which is very small in amount. But without their voice and demands in the national budget it is almost impossible to ensure equality in development.”
This centralised planning and budget development system actually paves the way for economic discrimination and injustice. It is very unfortunate that a businessman in Dhaka who has been allocated Tk 710 from the annual development budget pays the same amount of tax paid by a businessman in Mymensingh who enjoys only Tk 390 from the annual development budget.
But changes are in progress. Monower Mostafa says, “We have formed a parliamentary caucus comprising of 23 MPs. The objective of this caucus is to discuss and reform the related laws in the parliament to initiate a more participatory, decentralised and democratic budget.”
A country's budget charts the country's development whether it is Assia's motherhood or building bridges over great rivers. But when it is prepared without any participation of the people and their representatives, how we can we call such a country democratic?
The writer can be contacted at [email protected]
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