MPLADS

FEW schemes have evoked as much criticism as the Member of Parliament’s Local Area Development Scheme (MPLADS) for its various conceptual flaws and the manner in which it has been executed over the years. No wonder, the UPA government’s decision to raise the corpus for MPs from Rs 2 crore to Rs 5 crore under the scheme has come as a big surprise.

That the government decided to go ahead with the hefty raise despite the Planning Commission’s objection is surprising. The hike, effective from April 1, will result in an additional expenditure of Rs 2,370 crore a year. In May 2010, when Planning Commission Secretary Sudha Pillai presented an update to a Rajya Sabha committee on the scheme, members told her to consider pruning fund outlays of big ticket schemes to make available necessary funds for the scheme. In fact, members have been demanding an increase in the corpus since 1999 on the ground that Rs 2 crore was insufficient to undertake worthwhile projects in their respective constituencies. The scheme, introduced in 1993 when Dr Manmohan Singh was the Union Finance Minister with a budget of Rs 5 lakh for each MP, was raised to Rs 1 crore in 1994 and then to Rs 2 crore in 1998.

Experts have questioned the constitutional validity of the scheme and called for its abolition on the ground that it blurred the demarcation between the executive and the legislature. However, on May 6, 2010, the Supreme Court ruled that the scheme did not violate the principle of separation of powers because MPs could only recommend projects and it was the district administration, municipalities or panchayats that implemented them. The government kept modifying the guidelines of the scheme from time to time and introduced measures to ensure transparency, accountability and effectiveness even as states like Bihar have scrapped a similar scheme for MLAs following complaints of lack of transparency.
The government should address the concerns raised about the scheme. This is particularly important because in its latest review, the Comptroller and Auditor-General of India has raised the question of diversion of funds, use of funds for private and commercial purposes, inflated estimates and misreporting of work progress besides wrong selection of work. The scheme’s status report (1993-2010) shows encouraging trends with most states registering a whopping 90 per cent fund utilisation. But the government should come clean over reports about irregularities in its implementation. After all, it is the people’s money and the government — and the MPs — are accountable for every pie that they spend on development.