KOTTAYAM: The Kerala Grama Panchayat Association has submitted a memorandum to the State Finance Commission (SFC) seeking a more refined inter-governmental fiscal relations and smoother progress towards democratic decentralisation and at the same time taking a critical look at the constitution and composition of the Third SFC, where according to them "the Government had failed to honour the Kerala Panchayat Act, the constitutional mandate of the SFCs and the high traditions followed in the constitution and composition of the Union Finance Commission."

It may be for the first time in the country that an association of local bodies has submitted a comprehensive memorandum to the SFC availing the services of outside experts besides drawing from in-house experiences of its members. The memorandum was prepared by an eight-member task force chaired by eminent economist M.A. Oommen.

Commenting on the presence of serving officers on the SFC, the memorandum notes that the body was expected to adjudicate or arbitrate between the State and local bodies and as such propriety demanded that serving officers be kept out of it, as they were one party to arbitration. Moreover, the composition of the SFC goes against the advice of the Twelfth Finance Commission in this regard, it noted. The memorandum also points to the exhaustive nature of the terms of reference against the limited time frame.

One of the major demands in the memorandum is the call to put an immediate end to parallel fund flow in areas, which have been assigned to the panchayats. "Having assigned certain functions exclusively to panchayats, allowing other agencies or departments to handle those functions by allocating resources and personnel to them separately can affect the autonomy and efficiency in the functioning of Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRIs) as well as the State Government," the memorandum notes.

It has pointed to the District Rural Development Agency (DRDA), Centrally-sponsored schemes, MP Local Area Development Fund, MLA Funds and several departmental schemes which cover the domain of the PRIs. It calls upon the SFC to examine "whether the State and Central Government directly or through its agencies and schemes have encroached the PRIs domain making decentralisation ineffective."

It has also called for a review of several State Government decisions, which has "set the decetralisation regime in the reverse gear." Continuation of Rural Development and Local Administration Departments as separate entities, going back on the decision to make DRDA a sub unit under District Planning Committee (DPC), and above all the practice of heavy pruning of budget allocations through executive orders were "all against the canons of legislative powers," it says. It opposed the creation of several special development authorities, bringing back the contract system and introduction of bill system.

The memorandum calls for doing away with the village revenue office and for transfer of land records to the panchayats. The right to impose licence fees for use of natural resources should also be vested with the grama panchayats.

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