Capital Works
EVEN with functioning local bodies in place,
problems that cities face are not always easy to tackle. Especially for a city like
Kathmandu, the capital, where at any given time there are loads of tasks to do in running
the city. Keeping it clean is only one of the many gigantic tasks that Kathmandu city
fathers have. Maintaining roads is another. Preserving stone spouts, temples and bahals
within the metropolis is yet another task that the Kathmandu Metropolitan City has to be
engaged in. When the local bodies were dissolved a few months ago instead of renewing
their tenure for another one year pending the local elections, there was an understandable
anxiety among the local people across the country as to how the district-level,
village-level and city-level local bodies will function without their elected
representatives. They were concerned over the delivery of various services that the people
needed to receive from the local bodies. Kathmanduites, for their part, were too worried.
Having a chance to go and perhaps take their elected representatives to task, if
necessary, over the difficulties they face - be it to do with waste disposal and road
conditions-was no longer available to them because the people's representatives became
ex-representatives with the disbanding of the local bodies. It is fair to guess that there
are pending problems, big or small, in most of the 34 wards of the Kathmandu metropolis.
Development programmes under way during the past had the danger of tapering off because
the KMC was without the elected representatives.
Against this background, it comes as somewhat of
a welcome move that the KMC, which is now headed by a government official, the other day
said it wanted to advance the development and other programmes so that Kathmanduites would
not feel the absence of their representatives in the local government body. The decision
to depute departmental heads of the KMC to all the 34 wards of the metropolis to listen to
the complaints of the people and to address the problems sounds like a useful attempt to
work according to people's wishes. Though this limited number of KMC officials will each
handle a number of wards, they could still collect informed opinions-if they do
consultations intensely-from ex-representatives and civil society people as to the current
problems of respective wards and how they could be addressed. There is no choice but for
these officials and the chief of KMC to work extra hard.
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