Vacuum at VDCs

Village Development Committees (VDCs) have been devoid of elected political representatives for over seven years now, and the situation is worsening with a growing bureaucratic void in the villages. According to reports, over half the 3,915 VDCs across the country do not have secretaries, thanks to the security situation in the Tarai districts and the government´s Voluntary Retirement Scheme (VRS). Over 300 VDC secretaries have retired under VRS while another 200 posts have remained vacant for the last three years. In many security-sensitive districts, the VDC secretaries have shifted to district headquarters fearing for their lives and carry out their work from there. This means people have to travel all the way to district headquarters even for minor business such as registering births and deaths.



The political and bureaucratic void in the villages, not to mention the security deficit, has created a real problem of statelessness in rural Nepal. It has impacted development activities, administrative oversight and political pluralism, the bedrock of democracy. Absence of the secretaries affects basic state services such as recommendation for citizenship, land purchases and even registration of vital events like birth, death, marriage and migration. The absence of VDC secretaries has also impacted the distribution of social security allowances to the elderly, the differently-abled and the destitute.



The VDCs have been without political representatives since 2002 when then prime minister Sher Bahadur Deuba dissolved the local bodies duly elected by the people. This was just one in a series of political blunders that Deuba has committed in his political career. The immediate vacuum created by the dissolution was promptly exploited by the Maoists, who were then at the peak of their "People´s War". Militant and criminal groups in the Tarai are now similarly exploiting the political and administrative vacuum. Members of the general public in the Tarai live in terror of the militant groups and extortions, abductions and killings are rampant. If there is a single duty of the state that trumps others in priority, it´s providing security to its citizens. Unfortunately, even three years after the Maoists joined mainstream politics and ended the People´s War, common people live in constant insecurity-- even terror.



This should now end. The Home Administration has readied a Special Security Plan to prop up the security situation across the country. This should be backed up with a political and administrative plan to fill the void at the grass-root level. The government should take initiative to forge a consensus among the major parties on forming local bodies at the villages and the state should immediately fill the vacant posts of VDC secretaries and set them to work. People living in the villages deserve at least some semblance of the state if not its full-some presence.

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