Dwarfed local government bodies

After having systematically divested the local government bodies of powers that should have been vested in them, cheery words have been uttered for their future in the budget speech of the finance minister.
It is common knowledge that the Awami League-led government came to power on a raft of pledges contained in its electoral manifesto. It can hardly be overstated that one major contributor to the AL victory at the polls was the party's electoral commitment to strengthening the local government system.
The idea was that powers would be devolved from the central government on to the union parishads, upazila parishads and zila parishads. Three and a half years on, the elected bodies, even with greater women's representation look weakened as the MPs and the UNOs have more influence and power over the elected chairmen of the upazila parishads. The two sets of elected representatives have been brought into a conflicting relationship, although they were supposed to have well-defined mutually reinforcing roles to play. The result of this anachronism is the stifling of the potential of the local bodies to assist implementation of the ADP among a whole host of other activities the government undertakes in the health, family planning, education and crime control sectors.
Thus we hear from the finance minister an acknowledgement that the government 'could not make much headway towards the issue.' But he "promised to decentralise power and build a self-contained administrative arrangement for local government". This, he suggests, would form part of massive administrative reforms for future delegation of power.
He hopes to 'present an outline on this issue before the end of this government's tenure, as assured by the Prime Minister.'
The local government system has been unreformed, so to speak, and administrative reform has been a long pending issue. Clearly, status quo will be maintained during the current tenure of the government. True, local government and administrative reforms should have moved hand-in-hand but throwing the agenda into the future appears rather expedient at the moment.