Draft statute dilemma: Miss deadline or scrap public input

KATHMANDU, April 18: One thing is almost clear now. The Constituent Assembly (CA) will either miss its deadline for preparing the initial draft of the future statute or it will fail to take into account the input of public opinion. [break]



Each of the thematic committees of the CA has just four days to study and submit its report to the House to meet the April 23 deadline.



But the volume of suggestions is so enormous that the committees will hardly have time even to skim through them. For instance, the 42 members of the State Governing System Determining Committee have 57,522 opinion collection forms in their hands. Each form has 12 pages and one member has to go through 16,440 pages.



Forty-two members of the State Restructuring Committee have 56,365 forms to study in four days.



Put in a spot after failing to process the public opinion input garnered over the new constitution, senior officials of the Constituent Assembly on Saturday decided to start a debate on the contents of the future statute based on the preliminary draft prepared after three days of study.



To meet the April 23 deadline, the meeting decided to start a debate on the basis of the initial draft. “If the committees decide to revise the initial draft after studying and analyzing the entire body of suggestions, the House will send a report to the Constitutional Committee, pinpointing which points the committee wants to change,” stated guidelines passed by senior CA officials on Saturday.



The meeting also decided to have all CA members engaged in their work for 10 hours a day for the next three days to meet the deadline. “All the committees shall start their work at 8 a.m. and continue meeting generally till 6 p.m. and generally at the committees’ meeting halls,” the guidelines stated.



“We hope to complete the task within the deadline but we still have an option open for extending the timeline if we fail to accomplish our task,” says Nepali Congress Chief Whip Laxman Ghimire.



But extending the deadline as mentioned by Ghimire will affect the eight-week timeframe given for discussing the draft. The CA calendar has allotted five days each to the 10 committees for discussing the draft.

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