‘For growth, local bodies need to be empowered’

“We have no option but to empower the panchayats and make them more responsible. Also, for that matter, the urban local bodies. There is a sense of hesitation among these to use the property tax, hesitation to come up with credible development scheme. So we need to overcome that. These are the classic questions — what conditions, more conditions, no conditions, routing of money directly through state government, other intermediaries, monitoring of accounts. All these are constant challenges we have to counter and we do not have a satisfactory answer to these,” Singh said when asked about criteria of funding and monitoring of local bodies.

“This is one of the very big issues we are grappling with… So, how should the money go to the panchayats? Should it go directly from the finance commission to the state panchayats or routed through state governments. If they are not routed through the state governments, then they (states) say they did not route through us, they gave it directly to panchayats, so we do not have any control over that. If they are routed through the state governments, sometimes the conditions and control are such that because of their non fulfillment of those criteria, the funds are not received by panchayats,” he added.