Review Nepal
Kathmandu, Nepal, December 17, 2019: A group of lawmakers affiliated to the main opposition Nepali Congress (NC) have filed a writ petition at the Supreme Court (SC), the Apex Court of the country, on Monday demanding immediate scrap of the regulations governing the Constituency Infrastructure Development Program (CIDP) claiming that the regulation discriminate between lawmakers elected under First Past The Post (FPTP) and those elected under Proportional Representation (PR).
The lawmakers have argued that the regulation is not justifiable because it discriminate between lawmakers elected under FPTP and those chosen under PR. Since the Constitution of Nepal has given equal status to FPTP, PR and National Assembly lawmakers, how the CIDP regulations can provide the funds only to lawmaker elected under FPTP, the lawmakers have raised question marks in the writ petition.
The government has introduced recently the CIDP regulation to provide funds only to the lawmakers elected under the FPTP provision. Notwithstanding widespread protest and directives of the Supreme Court, the government has already decided to provide Rs 60 million to each of the 165 lawmakers elected under FPTP in the lower house of the federal parliament.
Not only the lawmakers under the PR category but also the civil society leaders and general public have opposed the provision to provide fund to the lawmakers on the name of executing development activities, thanks to the rampant cases of misuse of funds in the past.
With the provision, only the 165 lawmakers representing at the lower house of the federal parliament under the FPTP category will be able to mobilize the fund. There are 110 lawmakers under PR category in the lower house of the federal parliament and 59 lawmakers of the upper house.
The government has introduced the CIDP after the Supreme Court had issued an interim order against of the fund distributed earlier to the lawmakers under the Lawmakers Constituency Development Fund (LCDF). The SC had issued the ruling responding to the writ petition filed by lawmaker Jhapat Rawal.
Now, the NC Prakash Rashailee, Rangamati Shahi and Prakash Pantha have moved to the Supreme Court demanding immediate order to halt the fund distribution under the CIDP. In the writ petition, the petitioners have named the Office of the Prime Minister and Council of Ministers, the Ministry of Finance and the secretariat of the House of Representatives as defendants.
As the newly introduced regulations of the CIDP has also given authority to the FPTP lawmakers to select, monitor and evaluate the programs of to be executed development projects under the Rs 60 million CIDP fund, the critics suspect of high chance of misuse of funds though the local government mechanisms have authorized for channeling the funds.
Notwithstanding the criticism from various quarters, the lawmakers elected under the FPTP category, particularly the lawmakers elected from the ruling head Nepal Communist Party (NCP) had earlier lobbied hard to increase fund by at least 50 percent. The government has allocated Rs 9.9 billion in the budget of this fiscal year for the purpose.
