Kathmandu, June 25: Minister of Federal Affairs and General Administration Bhanubhakta Joshi spoke of the need to maintain uniformity in understanding federalism among all political parties and general public.
Responding to the queries raised by lawmakers on the Appropriation Bill-2081 BS in the House of Representatives (HoR) meeting, Minister Joshi called for ensuring that the managerial aspect of federalism be balanced, frugal, transparent, accountable, people-oriented and accountable.
Furthermore, Joshi saw the need for correctly analyzing enthusiasm of people’s representatives, political awareness, perspective towards development, civil services and bureaucracy and determine the framework for reforms and thereby implementing them.
He emphasized introducing soon the Federal Civil Service Act, the main pillar for implementing administrative federalism, through political consensus and collaboration. Joshi opined that the Act should be able to encourage the civil employees to be more motivated, hardworking and more dedicated towards public service delivery.
Stating that that first few years of implementing the new constitutional provisions would be challenging for any countries adopting and implementing new governance system like Nepal, he mentioned that many works were carried out in the last seven years of implementing federalism.
According to him, 165 new legislations were framed during these seven years while the draft of amendment of unbundling report that clearly explains the works of three-tier government has been prepared.
He explained that the political federalism was being institutionalized and two periodic elections were held in all three-tiers thereafter the governments being formed through democratic practices. The Minister assured that the government of Nepal would make arrangements to deploy civil employees in the provincial and local level in the provinces and local levels where the Province Service Commission were active and not active at the request of the concerned agencies in the province and local level.
Regarding stability of the Chief Administrative Officer at the local level, the Minister said that his Ministry had prepared criteria for deputation. He admitted that all local levels did not have Chief Administrative Officer as the employees recruited in limited vacancies would remain vacant owing to various reasons such as study leave, suspension, extraordinary leave and deputation in other agencies.
According to him, in such situations, the senior most employees in the local level who are civil service employees are assigned responsibilities to ensure smooth public service delivery.
