Govt approves Rs8.44 billion for new UC offices

Due to lack of new offices, most union councils are housed in drawing rooms of elected public representatives

LAHORE: The government of Punjab has approved Rs8.44 billion for the construction of new office buildings of union councils across the province.

The Punjab Provincial Development Working Party (PDWP) in its recent meeting, held on Tuesday, had given go ahead for construction of new buildings. The meeting was chaired by the Punjab Planning and Development Board Chairman Muhammad Jahanzeb Khan.



Speaking to The Express Tribune, Lahore Deputy Mayor Chaudhry Bilal said though new local government system had been put in place across Punjab but in various areas public representatives were running day-to-day governmental affairs from their drawing rooms and deras (guesthouses).

In Lahore, he revealed, over one-third union councils were unable to get permanent offices. Out of total 274 union councils nearly 105-110 union councils were being housed in drawing rooms of elected public representative. After delimitation 127 new UC were constituted in Lahore alone and several of these were still were in search of suitable place in their area, he maintained.

Bilal said though several new union councils had acquired office spaces on rent but still various public representatives were on lookout as they could not find any suitable place in their local areas for office.



Lahore Mayor Colonel (retd) Mubashir Javed, earlier, told The Express Tribune that the provincial government had released Rs350,000 to each UC in the province for maintenance office expenditures. The government had fixed a ceiling limit of Rs25,000 for the office rent that would be paid through this amount.

Javed had indicated that new public representatives were facing several procedural hurdles in spending public money. The government had announced ceiling limits besides stringent audit systems and several UCs were complaining that it was impossible for them to get any reasonable place for UC office in the given amount, especially in posh localities where rent rates were high, he pointed out.

Old system of City District Government Lahore (CDGL) had been removed and replaced with the news system which was under evolution.

Earlier, the CDGL had 26 departments which had been reduced to 6-7 under the new local government system.

“If these issues are related to Lahore only they might have been solved but the new local government system is for the whole province which requires time,” he said. Javed further disclosed not only him but also several other mayors from different areas of the province were struggling to speed up the system.

“You can find many local government representatives in power corridors of the city to get their local issues resolved as people in their areas are getting frustrated because of undue delays in finding solutions of local problems,” he said.



The mayor pointed out there were some issues on the part of public representatives too as several elected local government representatives did not know about functioning of government departments.

“Even after serving in several public offices I still sometime face problem in understanding the system. However, the government recently issued rules of business for local governments that had answered various questions that came in minds of local government representatives,” he said.

 

Published in The Express Tribune, July 13^th, 2017.