The National Assembly, today, did not approve the Economic and Finance Committee’s recommendation to use the same method as gewogs to allocate budget for thromdes and districts in the 13th Five-Year Plan. The plan document uses different resource allocation criteria for districts, gewogs and thromdes.
The National Assembly’s Economic and Finance Committee said that the distribution of annual grants, using different criteria is not an equitable and balanced distribution of resources.
The current Resource Allocation Formula distributes annual grants of Nu 34bn by looking at the number of resident population, geographical area and GNH index for districts.
Meanwhile, gewogs and thromdes use three additional criteria.
According to the committee, the current allocation method benefits some districts while many districts would receive lesser budgets compared to the method of using the same criteria for Gewogs, thromdes and districts.
To this, the finance minister said that the GNH index criteria for districts covers all other criteria.
Furthermore, the minister added that standard deviation formula was used to average out highest and lowest budget allocations in the districts and gewogs.
Finance Minister Lekey Dorji said, “If we do not use the standard deviation, the one who receives the least have very less amount. The one receiving a huge amount is receiving a lot. The difference is almost 600 per cent.”
However, the committee informed the House that using standard deviation will also mean some districts and gewogs will receive more budget allocation while others will see a reduced allocation.
Rinchen Wangdi, the Chairperson of the Economic and Finance Committee said, “The main objective of Resource Allocation Framework is for the small gewogs and population to receive a small budget. And the ones with the budget issues and huge transportation costs are supposed to receive a larger amount. But because of the standard deviation, both of them receive similar grants.”
The members also said that it is statistically wrong to use standard deviation at the outcome level.
Naiten Wangchuk, the MP of Monggar Constituency said, “The standard deviation should be done at the primary data of the six criteria. Each of the primary data have a weightage of five per cent and 20 per cent. The primary data results is the outcome. If we use standard deviation on the outcome, the weightage and the criteria is nullified. That is why this is wrong.”
Despite the committee’s push to do away with standard deviation and use the same criteria for gewogs, thromdes, and districts for resource allocation, members did not vote in favour of the committee’s recommendations.
Singye Dema / Samten Dolkar
Edited by Sherub Dorji
