Shankarnagar VDC
An Exemplary Local Government

By Mukti Rijal

LOCAL governments are slowly gaining ground in Nepal. This bodes well for the functioning and stabilising of democracy in the country. One may be disheartened and even frustrated with the quality of politics and politicians at the central level. And doom saying about the future of democracy may be doing round in the elite circles. But when one goes down to villages one can find very good reasons to be optimistic about the prospect of democracy and democratic polity in the country. Not all Village Development Committees have been able to create examples, inspire trust, and hope in the people.

Complaint

There are complaints that the grants and other resources made available to them are not correctly used and utilised. However, there are many VDCs in the Kingdom that have nursed and nurtured grassroots democracy and properly responded to development needs of the people. They have done their best to augment the volume of resources through indigenised local efforts and made use of the existing potentials in a very wise manner. Honesty and integrity of local leadership is well established and people repose fuller trust on them.

One such VDC is in the Rupendehi district. The VDC is Shankarnagar, which is wedged between the Butwal municipality and the famed Anandaban VDC. The VDC is an offshoot of the larger Anandban VDC that came into existence just one and half decade ago. It is presently one of largest VDCs in Rupendehi district in terms of population size and density. The VDC looks all set to leap into high level of progress and social advancement. One can see a big difference between this VDC and others even at a superficial examination.

All the nine wards of the VDC are accessible and connected to each other by well-graveled and paved network of road. The VDC is surrounded by a kind of ring road configuration. The width of road is standard twenty feet with culverts laid where they are needed. The streetlights illuminate the village ambience.

The record feat of the VDC is that it took initiative to blacktop the road cutting through the village to the skirt of the exemplary Shankarnagar Community forest. The VDC has been able to blacktop nearly three KM road with its own internally generated resources. The owners of the land facing on to the road contributed little bit of resource for the purpose while road construction materials were made tax and royalty exempt, says Krishna Bahadur GC, chairperson of VDC. It is to be noted that very few VDCs have capacity to finance the black topping of the road with their own resources.

The VDC collects a total revenue of about six million on an annual basis and spends the resource to create better village development infrastructures. Just a few years back the VDC was sustaining on about two hundred thousand rupees annual income. The rise in its revenue base is owing to the efforts put to resource mobilization within the ambit of law, informs the VDC chairperson. The VDC has recruited manpower including accountant, electricians, well trained technical assistant and office assistant at its own cost. It has also given incentive and perks to VDC secretary to ensure that he or she attends to his or her duty well. The VDC allocates quite an amount for human resource development. Trainings are organised for elected officials time an again.

The VDC is effective in regulatory functions. It has implemented a rule that requires that the groceries, tea stalls and restaurants should close by nine at night. This is done to check the alcoholic abuse and hooliganism that was rampant in the area. The VDC has formulated rule to prevent the stray cattle from creating roadblocks and damaging standing crops. Those owners letting out the stray cattle in the street are liable to be penalized.

The interesting part is the initiative taken by the VDC to regulate the Deusi and Bhailo programme. Those groups performing Deusi and Bhailo should so arrange that their programmes reflect true Nepali culture. They should not use the auspicious occasion to extort money on one or other pretext. The VDC has also fixed the range of donation for Bhailo and Deusi. Since last year, the regulation has been in force effectively. People are informed about regulations through recourse to miking time and again.

All the important decisions are taken on all party consensuses, remarks the chairperson at a chat with this writer. We are working in a competitive spirit. We have the Butwal municipality on the north and Anandban VDC on the south and east. We plan to overtake them in all aspects of development says chairman GC in a confident tone.

Rationale

Shankarnagar VDC provides an example of the emerging local government institutions in the country. There are many such VDCs doing well in both development and regulating fronts. This substantiates the retionale of decentralisation and local self-governance underway in the 10 countries.

Ray Of Sunshine From Mideast

WEARING a Foreign Legion-style sun hat over his yarmulke, the rabbi stretched a tape measure across the stones of a bridge embankment. Nearby, Egyptians hauled stones on a donkey cart to build a wall for the bridge.

Rabbi Schlomo Ziffer and consulting engineer Arieh Klein, visiting from Israel, were trying to reconcile neat measurements on paper with the rough reality of squeezing several hundred gravestones back into a cramped corner of millennium-old Jewish cemetery.

They were also engaged in an act of reconciliation in its broader sense last month, demonstrating that while Israelis and Palestinians were heading toward a new spasm of violence, Jews and Muslims could work together to save a piece of shared heritage.

To build a modern highway through the final resting place of countless Jews took international diplomacy, exacting care and hard physical labor. Now, with the effort in its final phase, Klein was using a handheld computer to plot the coordinates of gravesites, conferring with Ziffer in Hebrew and with an Egyptian foreman in a mixture of English and Arabic.

Two girls from a nearby slum turned up selling flat Egyptian bread from trays balanced on their heads.

"Joseph Mitrah. Died 17-9-1959 at the age of 74 years. Pray for him," read a legend carved in French on one tombstone. Another stone’s Hebrew letters and Star of David had been mostly worn away by desert wind and sand.

Eygpt today is home to only a few hundred Jews, but the cemetery is proof of a larger jewish past, and given the players and themes involved its rescue has been surprisingly free of drama.

"We’ve had good cooperation from Egyptians," Klein said. "We suggested the solution and they adopted it. It’s their execution."

Predominantly Muslim Egypt has a peace treaty with Israel, and its Jewish minority is usually left alone. Anti-Israeli or Anti-Jewish sentiment simmers, yet so sensitive is the cemetery issue that Egyptian authorities were willing to live with a delay of several years in the construction of the 60 mile (100-kilometer) Cairo ring road, an ambitious attempt to ease congestion in the Egyptian capital.

Ziffer’s New York-based Athra Kadisha Society works to preserve Jewish sites around the world. In 1992 it fought against construction of a shopping mall over a Jewish burial site in Hamburg, Germany. In Israel too, it frequently runs afoul of the secular public for trying to protect ancient cemeteries from developers.

While Christian and Muslim graves have been shifted from the ring road’s path, the Jewish ones could not be moved without gravely offending Jewish law, according to Athra Kadisha.

"According to Jewish law, a cemetery is the holiest place for Jews, holier even than a synagogue, explains Lazar Stern, an Athra Kadisha rabbi.

Stern said Athra Kadisha learned through newspaper reports in 1989 that Bastin, Just south of Cairo, was in the ring road’s way. The rabbis enlisted Rep. Benjamin Gilman of New York. The influential chairman of the House International Relations Committee raised the matter with Egyptian officials. U.S. Embassy officials have kept close watch over the project.

Eventually a compromise was reached: Though the graves could not be moved, the rabbis ruled that their markers could be pushed aside to make way for construction, provided they were put back afterward.

The two ends of the highway, long poised like two hands kept apart by Basatin, could finally come together.

Klein and Israel Klar, Israeli consultants brought in by Athra Kadisha, proposed covering the graves with earth and layers of tough woven plastic known as geotextile – humble dirt and high-tech plastic protecting the fragile bones and bearing the weight of the highway bridge on its concrete supports.

"The Egyptian government is to be commended for its ongoing commitment to completing this difficult project with the sensitivity necessary to ensure that Jewish religious sentiments and strictures were not violated," Gilman said in a statement to The Associated Press.

Carmen Weinstein, one of the few remaining Jews of Cairo, is Basatin’s self-appointed guardian. Over the years she has used her own money to buy out poor families squatting in the graveyard, to hire guards and to discourage neighbours from using Basatin as a trash heap.