The 13th Finance Commission has awarded a substantial fund of Rs 90 crore to panchayats and zilla panchayats in Goa. And significantly the first instalment of Rs 4.2 crore has landed in the government coffer. But the ultimate question is what the panchayats or the zilla panchayats would do with this money.

According to reliable reports, the state is still to spend the fund allocated by the 11th and 12th Finance Commissions. Even the director of panchayats admitted that the fund awarded by the last Finance Commission could not fully be utilised as the state was sorting out issues related to the 11th Finance Commission award which the state government had not released to the panchayats. This was the reason that the state could not get a fund of Rs 5 crore during the 12th Finance Commission.
The non-spending obviously implied that neither the state government nor the panchayats have over the years worked out development plans. There is lack of interest and coordination there. The funds are to be primarily utilised for operating and maintenance of rural water supply, sanitation, addressing garbage issues in villages, preparing data base for accounting, etc. This time the Commission has laid down that unless the performance report is not submitted no further fund would be released.
But the question is: how could the state government or the panchayats submit the performance report when they do not have any concrete plan or project to invest in? Sometime back the former chairperson of the district planning committee for north Goa, Ms Amol Morajkar had disclosed that none of the village panchayats of the district ever submitted their village development plans; ditto the case with south Goa; and as a result Goa has not been availing the central funds for village development. Do we not have a reason to ask what the panchayats have been doing?
Over the years the panchayats have turned to be instruments for making money. Focussing on mega projects serves the interests of the elected representatives in the panchayats. Significantly some time back the Transparency International’s ‘India Corruption study’ had revealed that Goa has a very high level of corruption in BPL schemes. In Goa’s case, the fact that the poor are the worst sufferers is also confirmed by hard statistics that shows that the Anti-Corruption Bureau has filed 57 cases of corruption against the officials of the panchayat department till April 2008, followed by the Public Works Department with 45 cases, police department with 40 and directorate of municipal administration with 37 cases. One thing is absolutely clear that Goan panchayats need to be doing a lot to deserve being seen as panchayats in the true sense of the term and the government should start the process of evaluating their performances and elevating them to the level of municipalities.