Updated: October 18, 2020 7:32:30 am
Mehbooba Mufti, Farooq Abdullah, Omar Abdullah at a meeting on Thursday.
With all senior political leaders, including Mehbooba Mufti, released, the Center on Saturday amended the Panchayati Raj Act of Jammu and Kashmir 1989 to facilitate the creation of District Development Councils (DDCs), whose members will be directly elected by voters in the Union Territory.
Each district will be divided into 14 constituencies for which elections will be held, and the winners will choose a president and vice president from among them. The councils will replace the District Development Boards, which previously (when J&K was a state) were chaired by a Cabinet Minister or a Minister of State and included MLA, MLC and members of Parliament.
What is the District Development Council?
The DDC will be made up of elected representatives from 14 territorial districts who will be identified in each district. It shall have jurisdiction over the entire district excluding parts under the municipal corporation. Each will have a fund made up of grants and its own resources. The Block Development Councils will function under the DDC.
When J&K was a state, the DDBs were the centerpiece of the planning and development architecture, and all funds to the districts were channeled through the development plan approved by them. Resources for the plan were obtained from the state budget and also included allocations made under various centrally sponsored schemes.
Administration sources said that the notification for the holding of elections to the 14 territorial constituencies in each district could be issued within a week or 10 days.
A senior Union Territory official told The Indian Express that this would empower the third level of government, local bodies, and was aimed at deepening the political process at the local level. But some other observers said that this essentially removed power to the second level of government (the state or the UT) and suggests that the Assembly elections in the UT might not happen anytime soon.
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While Omar Abdullah of the National Conference said the party still understood the implications of the amendment, PPD leader Naeem Akhtar said this would spell the end of the policy. “The goal is total depoliticization so that there is no central collective voice. It is cutting back the people of Jammu and Kashmir so that they have no political voice. The goal is to subdivide, overlap, layer after later so no one knows who’s in charge. In such a scenario, the final arbiter would be the bureaucrat and the security setup, ”Akhtar said. A senior North Carolina leader, who declined to be named, said the decision would have far-reaching consequences, especially in reducing the role of the MLAs.
According to administration officials, it was important to devise a structure at the local level to get the political process in motion now that all major political leaders had been released. “Some MLAs have indicated their willingness to contest the DDC elections,” said one official, who did not want to be named.
In addition to the 14 directly elected representatives, the DDCs will also include MLAs (as Assembly elections take place) and Block Development Council Presidents within the district.
The first step towards the constitution of the DDC will be the delimitation of the 14 electoral districts. The Deputy Commissioners will be responsible for dividing the area within the jurisdiction of a DDC into 14 single-member territorial districts. There will be reservations for registered castes, registered tribes and women in accordance with the provisions of the Law (Panchayati Raj).
With the Halqa Panchayat as the basic unit, the district’s annual and five-year development plans will be finalized through a three-tier system of Gram Panchayats, Block Development Councils, and District Development Councils. DDCs will receive plans from the Block Development Councils and, after scrutiny, will submit them “to adhere to government guidelines, standards, and rules” and submit the consolidated plan to the District Planning Committee.
DDCs will be elected for a five-year term and the District’s Additional District Development Commissioner (ADC) will be the Executive Director of the District’s Development Council. Each DDC will form five standing committees: finance, development, public works, health and education, and welfare.
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Meanwhile, each district will also have a District Planning Committee, with members of Parliament representing the area as chairpersons. The committee will be comprised of members of parliament representing the area, members of the state legislature representing areas within the district, chairman of the district’s District Development Council, chairpersons of city area committees / municipal district committees ; president of the municipal council / municipal corporation, if any; the district development commissioner; additional district development commissioner; district statistics and evaluation officer, as well as the chief planning officer.
This committee will “consider and guide the formulation of development programs for the district and indicate priorities for various schemes and consider issues related to the rapid development and economic improvement of the district. The powers of the committee shall also include the formulation of periodic and annual plans and the formulation and finalization of the plan and non-plan budget for each district.
J&K is also scheduled to hold preliminary elections for nearly 13,000 vacant panch and sarpanch seats in November. Of the 39,521 sarpanch / panch constituencies in 4,483 Halqa Panchayats for which elections were held in November-December 2018, 13,257 seats are currently vacant due to resignations, removals, election of sarpanchs as chairmen of the Bloc Development Council , deaths and unavailability of candidates at the time of the election.
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