Bureaucratic Tales

A NEWS story in this daily has it that a civil service officer has been away from his duty station for more than four years without information of valid reasons. However, he continues to enjoy his facilities even without doing his job. Authorities have not been able to take any action against him. This is a great distortion in our civil service. This may be just the tip of the iceberg with several such cases in different offices of the country, mainly in the districts. The government deputes employees in district offices but many, including the doctors do not even bother to attend these offices. Hospitals and health posts have suffered the most because the technical staff especially the medical professionals do not report at the assigned offices.

Such a tendency has further encouraged employees not to discharge their duty. This has been a major problem of our cumbersome bureaucracy. The government has promised to carry out administrative reforms and make the bureaucracy more effective and efficient. However, this has, so far, remained only in rhetoric. Today’s challenge is to translate this promise into reality. Bureaucracy is the vehicle to implement programmes and policies of the government in the most effective and efficient way. When bureaucracy itself is inefficient the programmes and policies of the government cannot benefit the target groups howsoever good they may be. There have been complaints and development activities have not been accomplished in time. This is because of the weak implementation aspect. As a result, social and economic development process has been slow in Nepal. The people’s faith in bureaucracy has not been very positive because of the bureaucratic red tapism, which needs to be eliminated as early as possible. One can just imagine how an office can function when its staff remain absent for four consecutive years. The ultimate sufferers are the people and the country. It is, thus, necessary to ensure swift and efficient work in the bureaucracy. This alone will ensure rapid development of the country. For this, the government needs to revamp the bureaucracy as per its promises of administrative reforms. While there is every need to streamline the erring civil servants be punished and the honest and efficient ones rewarded in practice. This can bring about drastic changes in the way the bureaucracy functions.

Darkness In Forests

NEPALESE have been correctly proud in having successfully promoted a scheme that is now benefiting hundreds of thousands of them. Nepal’s community forestry has become a beacon to other countries too, to try to have forests managed by the people themselves living near the forests, and not by foresters and rangers. Community forestry came into being in the early seventies after the disastrous experiments with nationalisation of forests in the sixties. It was realised that if the people are not given control over the forests in their vicinity and allowed to utilise them sustainably, barbed wire fences to keep the people out would not protect forests. The logic worked. Over the years, especially for the past ten years, community forestry has expanded greatly. Of the country’s total forest area, half of it sport community forests. Decentralisation may be a far-off thing in many other areas, but when it comes to community forestry, delegation of management responsibilities to forest users’ groups is a reality, though there are predictable bureaucratic red-tapism in handing over forests to user groups. There are currently over 10,000 community forestry user groups in the country. And such bands of users are expanding. Thanks to such community forestry, the total forest land area now stands at 36 per cent, a significant increase in the cover compared to ten years ago. The going has been good. So what prompted the Ministry of Forests and Soil Conservation to propose an amendment to the Forestry Act 2049 that could go to undo what has been achieved? This is unfathomable. Community forestry users’ groups, led by Federation of Community Forest Users’ Group Nepal (FECOFUN), are understandably up in arms against the ministry for proposing the amendment which, they allege, takes away the rights of local consumers to protect and use forests, besides promoting illegal logging and smuggling of forest products. A huge rally, participated in by forest users groups from across the country as well as promoters of community forestry, went around the capital Monday to protest the amendment. One of the points in the proposal includes a provision to bring forests in areas bigger than 50 hectares under the Department of Forests. Does the ministry, after all these years of community forestry, still think people are not capable of managing bigger chunks of forests? Ministry officials have been claiming that the protesting forestry consumer groups do not understand the finer points of the proposed bill. If that is so at all, shouldn’t they bother to explain to them and to the larger public right away what is it all about? The proposed bill must undergo a public hearing to dispel the current dark atmosphere hanging in the forests.