People deprived of service as VDC secys are on strike

Pointing at the non-implementation of their understanding to set up political mechanisms in local bodies, the Village Development Committee (VDC) secretaries have launched strike refusing to carry out jobs assigned for people's representatives, reports Nepal Samacharpatra daily.

According to Bhawani Prasad Ghimire, president of the VDC secretaries' association, the government failed to live up to its agreement to have political mechanism in place. The government and the VDC secretaries had reached the agreement one and a half month ago when the government had agreed to set up political mechanism within 15 days to operate the local bodies.

Consequently, the VDC secretaries have launched a strike refusing to carry out service delivery activities like providing recommendations for birth, death, citizenship, land ownership, migration certificates and so on.

Currently, the government-appointed VDC secretaries are authorised to carry out all the VDC level functions as fresh elections have not been held to fill the vacancies like VDC chairpersons.

On the other hand, Surya Prasad Silwal, spokesperson of the Ministry of Local Development, said that the Ministry has already recommended the government to create the political mechanism.

However, due to differences among major parties, the political mechanism could not be created yet. While the Maoists have proposed to divide the seats in local bodies in the same formula as they divided seats in the parliament, the Unified Marxist Leninist (UML) has protested their proposal. nepalnews.com sd Aug 20 07

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