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Decentralised budget funds for district secretaries, not MPs; opposition protests
A confrontation is brewing between opposition MPs and the government over the move to allocate funds under the decentralised budget programme to district secretaries instead of parliamentarians.
The district decentralised budget for this year amounts to Rs. 11,250 million. The allocation comes after a three-year hiatus. No funds were released under the decentralised budget in 2021, 2022 and 2023. This year, funds will be disbursed to district secretaries, while the responsibility of overseeing the development activities using those funds has been placed with the district coordination committees and their chairpersons.
In terms of a Treasury circular, with the approval of the district coordination committee, the district secretaries must submit a list of projects that can be undertaken by each division using funds from the decentralised budget. This must be submitted to the Department of National Planning before January 31.
Subject to the department’s approval, the Presidential Secretariat will release the necessary funds to the district secretaries. The Treasury has stressed that projects approved under the decentralised budget must be completed before July 31 this year. No project proposal approved under the programme can be amended after April 30 this year except under exceptional circumstances.
Opposition MPs, however, are unhappy over the changes made by the Treasury to divert funds under the decentralised budget to district secretaries instead of MPs in their respective districts. Each MP would usually receive more than Rs. 10 million under the decentralised budget to carry out essential development activities in their electoral districts, Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) parliamentarian Dayasiri Jayasekara told the Sunday Times.
“Earlier, funds under the decentralised budget were given directly to MPs, but the procedure they are adopting now is completely different. We have spoken with many of our opposition colleagues over this issue, as this process is disadvantageous to us. We could not do anything in the villages for three years due to the failure to release funds under the decentralised budget,” Mr. Jayasekara said.
He said opposition MPs hoped to go as a group and meet the President next week to request that funds be released under the previous system, enabling MPs to serve the people in their respective districts.
The new process had been devised jointly by the Finance Ministry, the Presidential Secretariat, and the Prime Minister’s Office on the concept of President Ranil Wickremesinghe, a senior Treasury official said. “The process has been designed to strengthen the district so that the people themselves can present their views about what they need.”
The funds would go directly to the district secretaries once approval was received. The secretaries would thereafter convene a meeting of all stakeholders to decide among themselves what they needed to do, the Treasury official said. The entire process would be transparent, and MPs would no longer be able to exercise undue influence on funding, the source remarked.
“For example, MPs will not be able to manipulate the process to award contracts for these projects to their relatives and associates. A particular project can’t be green-lighted just because an MP says so. Each proposal sent will be carefully analysed before being approved and will be subjected to rigorous supervision,” the official claimed.
The highest allocations under the decentralised budget have been made to the districts of Colombo (1090 million), Gampaha (1033 million), and Kurunegala (860 million). The Kilinochchi district has received the lowest allocation, Rs. 80 million. The government says the allocations have been made based on the population density of each district.
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