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Bhutan - Local leaders learn planning, accounting and PR |
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Kuensel Online
Posted on Saturday, March 19 @ 17:13:29 CST BST
Mongar:19 March 2005- Prioritising the needs of the people at the geog level is not easy.
Villagers often have a list of things all of which seem important says the Orong gup, Dozang. ?It becomes difficult to prioritise one over the other.?
Sometimes an entire section of the community is infuriated because of what is given priority and sometimes by the blunt dealing of the geog leaders.
The Orong gup and 131 other Geog Yargay Tshogchung (GYT) members including 66 geog clerks of the eastern dzongkhags hope to learn to deal with these issues as well as maintaining books of accounts in a week-long regional workshop in Mongar which began on March 17.
Resource persons from various departments and ministries will brief the elected leaders and their clerks during the workshop conducted by a ?local governance and decentralisation? project funded by JICA.
The aim, according to the officials from the ministry of home and cultural affairs (MoHCA), was to strengthen and enhance the local leader?s institutional capacity.
The minister for home and cultural affairs, Lyonpo Jigmi Y. Thinley, who spoke to the GYT members at the opening of the conference reminded them that they had important and immense responsibilities to shoulder as the representatives of the people.
?You are the voice and the minds of the people and must to be able to understand the difficulties and needs of the people,? said Lyonpo Jigmi Thinley.
The minister said that the gups should be able to prioritise the important projects that would benefit to the whole village and should be implemented correctly so that the people are not dissappointed.
Lyonpo Jigmi Thinley said that it was also important for the local leaders to learn to maintain books of accounts. ?You might do a good job in developing your geog but if the people find any shortages in the geog money, they will point their fingers at you,? he said.
A home ministry official told Kuensel that the village leaders knew what they needed and what their villages needed but they didn?t know how to go about achieving it.
?They don?t know the proper procedures involved in carrying out activities in their geogs,? said the ministry?s project manager, Karma Doma Tshering. ?They can draw up plans on priority basis but they cannot start on their own, which is why we need to educate them through interactive forums like this.?
She added that the gups and their clerks would be taught to fill up various forms, deal better with their people and maintain books of accounts. ?The topics of discussion are those they picked themselves,? said the project manager.
The gups and their clerks told Kuensel that they expected to return to their villages learning something as plain as filling up forms to maintaining books of accounts during the weeklong workshop.
The Urung gup?s clerk, Dechen Zangmo, said it was important that they learn to keep good connections with the villagers because the entire village was interdependent. But learning to maintain books of account was more important for her.
?We have maintained accounts so far but they are inconsistent,? said Dechen Zangmo. ?That is because we keep the accounts only when the government stressed on it and reminded us every once in a while.? |
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