Curbing profligacy

The Office of the Prime Minister and Council of Ministers has put a cap on unnecessary district visits by ministers after their expenses on travel and daily allowance soared dramatically. The OPMCM has issued a directive asking the ministers to curb unnecessary district visits and to limit the necessary ones to two days. The directive also says only two aides can accompany a minister making such trips. It´s a welcome directive since the ministers and their aides were making unnecessary trips to the districts, primarily in connection with party activities, thereby placing an additional burden on state coffers. The OPMCM has written to the ministers stating that if they violate the directive and make trips longer than two days or take along more than two aides, the additional costs incurred due to violation of the directive will have to be borne by the ministers themselves.



The government must promote austerity and cut down unnecessary spending. In a country where most of the government revenue is spent on financing regular expenses -- chiefly salaries, allowances and interest on domestic and foreign loans -- the need to implement strict austerity measures can hardly be overstated. But then, one of the reasons why our regular expenditures are so high is also our failure to contain unnecessary expenses. The fact that the ministers spent 15 million rupees on domestic trips since July 2009 is just one example of how profligate they have been when it comes to spending out of state coffers. Besides, there are also reports of ministers and their aides tampering with bills, and sometimes even producing fake ones, for reimbursement of expenses. As much as this calls for deeper investigations it also calls into question the basic morals of such ministers.



The Prime Minister, the leader of the Council of Ministers, and his office must take the lead in containing these profligate ways and irregularities. The Prime Minister must lead from up front. However, if other ministers see a huge gap between what the PM preaches and what he practices, they are unlikely to take him or the directive from his office seriously.



Unfortunately, Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal does not have a good track record in this regard. He hasn´t been implicated in any irregularities and he personally remains clean when it comes to financial matters. But he has shown great weakness in distributing state largesse. Having already spent the allotted money for this fiscal year, the Prime Minister has sought additional funds to be distributed to individuals and organizations at his discretion. It´s time the chief executive also followed austerity norms in distributing state largesse and led by example.

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