Voters are the masters of the politicians, because they are voted to power to become MPs and MLAs, by the voters and such elected members even become ministers later on (ours is a West Minister system, copied from the Britain constitution in which ministers are chosen, from the elected members of Parliament).
Hence, if voters find any irregularities in the performance of politicians, they can be rejected in the next elections. Moreover, the voters also have rights, to ventilate their voice, if there are any kind of malpractices found in the politicians, pertaining to the corruption or in their dealings, with regard to public funds, coming from the taxpayers money.
Now this ‘Member of Parliament Local Area Development scheme’ is totally found to be a worthless scheme, meant for legislators, for not utilizing it, for the specific purpose of developing their constituencies. Actually, this scheme was introduced in 1993, during the Narsimha Rao Government’s period, to appease MPs and also to secure support from them. The MPs must remember that they have to make use of the entire amount of funds given to them, before the expiry of the term of the Lok Sabha, otherwise, the funds given to them, for the above said period lapsed.
Sometimes, 25 to 30 per cent of funds remaining unspent, out of Rs five crore (which is entitled to get by each MP today) and such development scheme funds, are handled by the Ministry of Programme implementation.’
Now though the funds that are meant to be used exclusively for infrastructure development in constituencies, there is a lot of chance of misusing them and guidelines in implementations, are not properly followed. Secondly, the funds are diverted to ineligible projects and they are transferred to private trusts, controlled by MPs.
Besides, the execution is handed over to favored contractors. Sorry to say, that there is no effective procedure to monitor the expenditure. Further, it should be noted that when such large public funds are spent, there must be transparency in the expenditure framework. But this scheme is wholly lacking in implementation, one must say.
Even CAG, has rapped such a scheme on finding irregularities in the utilization of funds. Even if guidelines are tightened in future, there won’t be any kind of improvement in the scheme, as opined by the experts and statesmen.
Hence, when their funds, drawn under the scheme is misused, there is no good reason to keep such a scheme which never serves the genuine purpose of proper developing constituencies belonging to MPs.
