Lalitpur, Mar. 22: District development committees and municipalities have to select development projects with a long term perspective and allocate means and resources for them in a balanced way.
Many development planners and others concurred on this view at a seminar organised here today by National Planning Commission Secretariat, regional project office.
The seminar stressed ddc’s need to see how to take co-operation and suggestion from National Planning Commission on development project selection and formulation of periodic projects for the overall development of districts and municipalities.
They advised that while selecting projects, district development committees should see whether the project were in tune with its goals and perspective.
Under the Local Governance Act-2055 bs., each district development committee are to formulate periodic and annual development projects by themselves and a periodic project will have a time frame of at least five years.
The seminar also suggested that district development committees should also determine social and economic development targets and priorities of respective districts and chalk out strategies and specific time-frame to realise them.
A period development project should also see how to increase district people’s access to basic economic opportunities and social services.
The participants also stressed the need to see how to direct public and private sector investment in long-term utilisation of natural, economic and social resources in a particular district, how to protect and promote its environment, how to ensure proper population distribution and development of settlements in a particular district.
The district development committees should formulate projects within the frame work of the Local Governance Act and regulations, the policy directives and guidelines of National Planning Commission, but its project outlay should not exceed the budget ceiling set by the Finance Ministry. Besides, it should also see that the projects selected would create job opportunities to the direct benefit of the people, they added.
Calling for provision of necessary means and resources to the district development committee, they suggested that ministries should formulate projects in co-ordination and co-operation with district development committees instead of formulating them on regional basis.
Earlier, inaugurating the seminar, National Planning Commission vice chairman Prithvi Raj Ligal said that as project selection was still being done on the basis of conjecture the National Planning Commission was pursusing the policy of formulating periodic projects by itself.
Project selection should be done in keeping with the aspirations of the local people, he stressed.
“The National Planning Commission does not intervene in the implementation of the projects which were selected in keeping with the local people’s aspirations and which could receive local people’s participation,” he said and pointed out, “there is a policy of making available more budgetary fund to the district going ahead implementing its properly selected projects.”
From the chair, National Planning Commission member Dr Shanker Shamra said that periodic district development projects should be formulated to ensure proper mobilisation of budgetary outlay or development fund to be made available to district development committee by the government or ministries.
Joint secretary at the npc secretariat Bhagavati Kumar Kafle said the outcome of the seminar would go a long way in the formulation of period development projects of the districts.
Chairman of Lalitpur district development committee and district development committees’ federation Madhav Poudel said the National Planning Commission categorise development projects.