FEATURES NEWS THE RISING NEPAL (DAILY)

Good Governance In South Asia
A Challenging Task

By Khilendra Basnyat

THE issue of good governance has emerged as one of the major concerns for policy-makers and administrators throughout the world. This issue demands special attention in South Asia.

In the past, South Asia’s administration remained more accountable to the democratic process. However, today, its quality has been degenerated due to weak governance in this region.

In most of these countries, the parliament, cabinet and civil services are especially responsible for ensuring good governance. However, unfortunately, they have declined in quality over the years in these countries.

Politicised

In fact, South Asia’s parliament does not do what it should and strives to do what it should not. This region’s cabinet has shown a singular inability to tackle the problems faced by citizens. Likewise, the civil services in this region have been highly politicised, thereby misutilising their capabilities.

Police services are more and more becoming a negotiable commodity in most of the South Asian countries, where political intervention and inaction can be bought by the affluent people. The poor thus see the police force as a source of insecurity rather than as an instrument to protect their rights and ensure their security.

As such, it is quite natural that the police are feared as much as the criminals because most of this region’s people can never be sure what to expect from them. Since the police may connive with and protect criminals and be used by the ruling political party and the rich to promote their interests, the forces of law and order are seen to be part of the problem of the criminalisation of society rather than its solution.

It is evident that most of the international reports on transparency have placed South Asian countries among the most corrupt in the world. In these countries, corruption charges against elected officials as well as bureaucrats are extensive. This has not only affected citizens’ legitimate rights but also created a widening credibility gap between the rulers and citizens.

In the present context, unless the executive is made accountable before the law, and the corrupts and criminals can be penalised under the rule of law, the issue of judicial and police reform will remain integral to the quality of South Asia’s governance.

The once transparent mechanisms of recruitment have been undermined. Part of this process lies in the expansion in administration size, the need to accommodate backward areas, castes, tribes, women and other deprived interest groups. This has deteriorated the quality of administration in this region.

Similarly, the bureaucratic growth in the South Asia region has encouraged political interference planned to abuse the recruitment process as an instrument of political patronage and for politicisation of administration. This process encourages political opportunism among the bureaucrats instead of promoting independence of thoughts and actions. What is more, it protects the incompetent and corrupt from being exposed to disciplinary action and finally undermines the integrity and efficiency of administration. In all the countries of this region, the process of politicising administration is accelerating by encouraging corruption and eroding the quality of governance.

No doubt, politics is essential for the overall development of a country. However the degeneration in the caliber and motivation of the leadership and political leaders has caused negative impact on this region’s administration. Actually, a messy political culture cannot hope to extract good governance from its bureaucracy, which assume the colour and behavioural traits of their political leaders.

In many South Asian local government organisations, high levels of absenteeism have been realised, especially among field staff associated with a supply of a variety of civic services. It has also been discovered that doctors, teachers and supporting staff deputed to rural areas of this region have been taking advantage of the absence of supervision from the concerned officials. However, the people of this region have been deprived of basic civic services.

In reality, a misgoverned polity and administration spreads to the private sector as well as civil society. Bad governance brings forth malfeasant entrepreneurship and eventually corrupts civil society.

Contempt for the rule of law and administrative norms are seen as the only source of survival in a degenerated polity. In such case, fundamentalism reinforced by terrorism as an instrument of politics appears to have emerged as a natural by-product of the deterioration in democratic institutions. As groups of citizens alienate from the institutions of governance, they will fall prey to aberrant social and political formations.

In fact, good governance needs proper distribution of powers and functions based on rules, procedures and institutional norms. When such norms are violated by political parties and governments, politics becomes messy and uncertain. Such circumstance has been observed in India and Nepal in the wake of unprincipled equations being made for making and breaking government.

Unluckily, the priorities of the emerging leadership in these countries are different from the real needs of the governance. Actually, these designs have less to do with the problems of governance and more with benefits that leaders can enjoy for individuals or constitutional gain.

Poverty is widespread in South Asian countries. It has been found that the per capita income in most of these countries is below US$ five hundred per year. Behind this low per capita income lies huge income disparity which means that the poor’s actual per capita income is perhaps half the region’s average.

Increasing Poverty

In reality, South Asia is the home to the world’s poor. An estimate based on the per capita income of US$ one per day put the number of poor as high as fifty percent or over six hundred million out of the total South Asian population of about 1.3 billion is 1999. Whether the number of the poor is exact or not, the most serious threat to governance arises from increasing poverty.

One of the main problems of governance afflicting all South Asian countries, except Sri Lanka, is population growth. High population growth in these countries is responsible for slow growth in per capita income, heavy burden on natural resources and so on. What is more, demographic growth in these countries has inherent risks, creating diverse political problems. Hence it is very difficult to ensure good governance in these countries.

Other Stories