How not to fund a legislator

During a debate in Lok Sabha this week, as the MP local area development (MPLAD) scheme was referred to in passing, Speaker Somnath Chatterjee intervened to say that he was completely opposed to it. This is a view he expressed very emphatically when he was less encumbered by the duties of a presiding officer. The current amount each MP has, as an annual entitlement to undertake capital-intensive asset building, is Rs 2 crore. When first instituted in December 1993, the amount was just Rs 50 lakh. A year later, it was increased to Rs 1 crore for each MP. In 1998, it was Rs 2 crore. And now, there is a demand, which was being voiced this week again, to raise it to Rs 5 crore.

The scheme was begun in Narasimha Rao’s tenure under the ministry of rural development, but it now falls under the ministry of statistics and programme implementation. Audits by the media these days take to task those MPs who have not spent enough or quickly enough out of their allocations; and an MP with unspent funds is reprimanded for not having done her job.

One school of thought (one which the majority of MPs subscribe to, it appears) is that MPs need to be able to show something for what they do, and for priorities they identify as high in their constituencies, and in areas where the executive may have a different point of view, and may not have spent much. These MPs believe that if they are seen to be delivering on specific projects in their areas (which may be popular projects), filling gaps in the executive’s functions, they would be better integrated with the dynamics of the areas.

It is interesting that the Local Area Development Scheme (which by the way is extendable to MLAs and also local area elected representatives, with reasonable sums) is taken as being integral to the job of a representative of an area. Actually this is quite the opposite of what MPs are meant to be doing. It is not as if MPs can do what they like. The guidelines under the rural development and then the statistics and programme implementation ministries have prescribed a monitoring mechanism, to oversee the projects MPs take up. According to the ministry of statistics and programme implementation’s First Report of the MPLADS scheme (which studied the scheme from its inception till 2006): “The Government informs the state nodal department about the MPLADS funds being released to the District authorities, who in turn report the status of the MPLADS information to the government of India and the state nodal department.” There are other guidelines in place too, such as the time when the funds are released, the importance of utilisation certificates to be made available after the work is completed, a ceiling on funds to be given to works belonging to societies and trusts (Rs 25 lakh), a certain percentage to be set aside for areas inhabited by Scheduled Castes (15 per cent), and a certain amount to be set aside for areas inhabited by Scheduled Tribe populations (7.5 per cent).

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