19 ministries defy NPC order to improve performance

Bishnu Prasad Aryal
Kathmandu, April 24

The 19 ministries are found defying the recommendation of the National Planning Commission (NPC) to improve performances. The NPC suggested the ministries to take action against the secretaries and other related staff belonging to the concerned ministries for poor and low performance but to no avail.

According to the NPC sources, it has been monitoring 80 big and top priority projects and those impacting on public level in the current fiscal year. The monitoring and evaluation on the performances of those projects under 19 ministries in the first four months of the current fiscal year was publicised on the first week of January.

Those projects include Office of Prime Minister and Ministers-2, Ministry of Education-4, Ministry of Health and Population-4, Ministry of Women, Children and Social Welfare-1, Ministry of Physical Planning and works-15, Ministry of Irrigation-8, Ministry of Energy-7, Ministry of Local Development-9, Ministry of Agriculture and Cooperatives-6, Ministry of Forestry and Soil Conservation-4, and Ministry of Tourism and Civil Aviation-2.

Similarly, others are Ministry of Science and technology-1, Ministry of Environment-2, Ministry of Finance-2, Ministry of Peace and Reconstruction-2, National Planning Commission-1, Ministry of Labour and Transport Management-1, Ministry of Land Reforms and Management-1, Ministry of Industry-1, Ministry of Commerce and Supplies-1 and Miscellenous-4.

Among them, only NPC, MoLTM and MoPR were able to meet the target. The NPC found that rest of those projects including Melamchi Drinking Water Project, distribution of biometric smart card and state facility ID cards from the Office of PM could not meet the target and some were not implemented at all.

“After monitoring, we recommended the concerned ministries to take ministerial actions such as decrease in grades and issuance of warning but none of them has been reported to us yet,” said Dhruba Prasad Dahal, joint-secretary at the NPC. “If the progress of a project is below than 80 per cent, the Office of the Auditor General can stop the budget release,” he said.

However, this is not implemented here. The reports of paper and desk based monitoring of the NPC are submitted to the Office of the PM for execution. The evaluation committee coordinated by Vice-Chancellor of NPC aims at finding out problems, challenges and solutions along with implementation of norms, review and formulation of future policies and strategies and budget allocation.

It is not our responsibility to take direct action against them, said Dr Dinesh Chandra Devkota, member of the NPC. “We only recommend them to improve the performance and take responsibility of the bad performance,” he said. “We are about to release the second four-month monitoring of those 80 projects. The secretaries should express commitment to meet the target in consecutive four-months. However, we have not received anything about the first monitoring from the ministries,” he added.

Dinesh Kumar Thapaliya, spokesperson for the MoLD, said that the ministry was ignorant about the direction from NPC and they were not obliged to submit the action reports to NPC. “We inform about internal affairs to the government Chief Secretary. The NPC can not take action against the government officers,” he added. “The reason behind the low performance belongs to the political causes.”