New Road footpath conundrum

Structural flaws built into witless federalization at work

By Bihari Krishna Shrestha

SEVERAL TIERS FIGHTING IN TURNS

When there is a local development project under construction, whether it be a drinking water, road or canal project, the normal atmosphere is such that its users take a keen interest in it to ensure quality construction even as they also want to see it done fast so as to benefit from it as early as possible.

But the recent footpath expansion project at New Road at the heart of Nepal had a completely different spectacle to offer. It saw various agencies from the federal road department to local users engaged in a mutual confrontation over several weeks, finally ending in an agreement not to do the project.

Fight Number One

Although it is not known yet from where Mayor Balen Shah got his inspiration, he decided to widen the New Road footpaths that would have narrowed the main road and ruled out the roadside parking of vehicles. In social media itself, most people were all for it and seemed to have derived their inspiration from what they had seen in Europe or America.

When the municipal crew started to dig the road for the intended expansion, the locals under the leadership of Mayor Shah’s own Ward chairman began to protest. The work was stalled. The ward chair himself happened to be a member of the left party in government, the Communist Party of Nepal (United Marxist Leninist). Soon afterwards, the federal Road Department under the minister of that party intervened, declared that New Road belonged to its jurisdiction and sent its own crew and instantly redid the part of the road already dug up.

The Road Department did not stop there. To prevent what it saw as Mayor Shah’s adventurism, it painted the initials of the Department on the lamp posts on that road and in many other roads too in the city indicating that they belonged to the central government and the metropolitan council had no business meddling with them. It was a big rebuke to Mayor Shah.

It was Mayor Shah’s turn to make the rebutting move. He petitioned the High Court to assert his own right over the local roads. The High Court too lost no time in issuing an Interim Order, authorizing the mayor to proceed with his project.

In excitement, Mayor Shah, an engineer-turned-rapper-turned-mayor, staged a gleeful group dance that went viral on social media to celebrate the verdict but more importantly, as a message to the federal leaders that they were finally vanquished.

Fight Number Two

But the mirth and glee of that victory dance did not last long. When, the next day, the mayor’s crew equipped with heavy machinery started digging the roadside again, this time the whole people of the area descended on them all over again, this time raising the fears of violence that then saw Nepal Police too deploy a large contingent of its own policemen. The whole stretch of the road was jam-packed with people, making the situation volatile.

The Kathmandu Metropolitan City expanding the New Road footpaths. 

The Ward chair himself started working from his makeshift office on the roadside throwing the gauntlet at his own mayor that he would be on the street until the project was withdrawn. Finally, the mayor was forced to relent. The Kathmandu Metropolitan Council agreed to withdraw on July 22, 2024 its New Road beautification project of expanding the footpath by a couple of meters for ease of travel for pedestrians.

CONFUSION GALORE

 The most inconvenient aspect of this whole development, rather a fiasco, has been that there was too much confusion as to who had the authority over this piece of road. Firstly, KMC, its mayor primarily, thought that it was his prerogative to do what he wanted on the road.

Then the federal government stepped in and declared that it had exclusive jurisdiction over all such roads by comically pasting signs on the lamp posts to that end.

The Court disagreed and rendered its verdict in the mayor’s favour.

But at long last, it turned out to be the local people who finally prevailed.

FOOLISH FEDERALIZERS DIDN’T KNOW THE CONCEPT OF MARGIN OF AUTHORITY

In the final analysis, the problem has its roots in the foolishness of the pundits who federalized Nepal. This problem was very much in view when they foolishly reduced the number of local bodies from some 3500 VDCs and municipalities in existence then into a mere 753 urban and rural municipalities today.

This reduction in the number of local bodies went directly against the goal and spirit of the compelling slogan then of “Singha Durbar to the Villages”.  In operational terms, it meant that the local people would exercise full authority in identifying their own problems, planning their own programmes, mobilising their own resources, and implementing and evaluating their plans in an ongoing manner without having to refer their decisions to higher authorities for permission to execute them. In other words, the people who would be affected by those projects had the margin of authority to design and implement plans on their own. To achieve this laudable goal, they should have devolved authority further down to the communities.

The federalizing pundits were clearly unaware of the Panchayat Day experience in this regard. Since almost all panchayat members of any consequence slowly but steadily turned out to be corrupt, it was clear that they were not being accountable to the people, the system then innovated the institution of user groups equipped with the margin of authority necessary for doing their own projects. To that extent, the VDCs’ authority was clipped and devolved to the user groups themselves.

The grandest success of this redistribution of state powers based on the concept of margin of authority is evidenced by the world-applauded success of our nationwide network of Forest User Groups. Unfortunately, the federalizing authority was not sufficiently professionally equipped to do justice to the task they were entrusted with.

TOLE ORGANIZATIONS FOR URBAN RENEWAL AND DEVELOPMENT

In the urban context too, particularly in the Kathmandu Valley, the most potent regional entity for urban renewal initiatives has traditionally been the neighborhood entity, the Tole. Every single Kathmandu dweller knows to which Tole he or she belongs. In the federal design, this grassroots entity should have been given due place and devolved with sufficient authority to do their own planning and execution of their projects.

To come back to the New Road conundrum, had a New Road Tole User Group existed with the necessary authority, mayor Shah would have perforce consulted the New Road residents about the advisability of the New Road footpath expansion and narrowing of the roads to that same extent. Going by what happened just now, the New Roaders would have turned down the offer and that would have been the end of the story.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect People’s Review’s editorial stance.