The government is reported to be considering a massive expansion of the MPLAD scheme. Each member of Parliament is currently allocated Rs 2 crore each year to spend on her constituency (or state for those belonging to the Rajya Sabha) under the Local Area Development scheme. That amount could now be hiked to Rs 5 crore. Sriprakash Jaiswal,who holds independent charge of the ministry of statistics and programme implementation,which is mandated to look after the scheme,told this newspaper that a proposal is to be moved to increase the corpus accordingly. There are,however,good reasons for the minister to curb his enthusiasm and take stock of the deeply polarised debate on the subject. The scheme was introduced in 1993 by P.V. Narasimha Rao and many saw it as a brilliant political move to give Lok Sabha members a stronger stake in seeing the House last its full term. Since then,it has been institutionalised,with MLAs too allocated a hefty amount each year. Official literature explains the aim is to enable each legislator to recommend and have executed capital expenditure in a constituency. While charges of corruption have inevitably raged,audits have indicated that many,if not most,projects have proceeded properly. Votaries of the scheme argue that such funds allow MPs to be responsive to local needs. In this vein they ask for the money to be increased,so that the projects can be more ambitious. But arguments against the scheme do not draw only from the actual projects undertaken though there is criticism that such works can be haphazard and,as a planning commission report noted some years ago,maintenance of assets is often under-budgeted. The criticism is more on structural grounds,and finds utterance in a report of the Administrative Reforms Commission headed by Veerappa Moily (now law minister),that such schemes seriously erode the notion of separation of powers,as the legislator directly becomes the executive. The ARC recommended that the schemes be scrapped. At a time when there is a consensus to increase social sector spending,we need to ask whether an MP/MLAs task of monitoring delivery requires precisely that separation of powers.
