PESHAWAR, Jan 3: The doing away with the district government system in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa exposed the government-funded development works to multiple problems as several administrative issues were likely to surface, officials told Dawn.

The future of a score of development activities would now entirely depend on the offices of deputy commissioners in all the 25 districts following the abandonment of the town/tehsil administrations and district governments.

Officials said that the concentration of official authority in the newly revived administrative posts of deputy commissioners would negatively affect the execution and pace of development activities in all the districts.

Similarly, the development works, opined a senior official, would also suffer because the offices of deputy commissioners were expected to be overburdened under the new scheme of things.

“It had taken almost two years to streamline development activities in the districts after the introduction of the devolution of powers system in August 2001, and now once again a host of administrative issues are set to crop up following the provincial government’s decision to replace the local government system,” said a development planner.

Under the devolution of powers system, added the official, the execution of a number of development works was being supervised by the district governments in all the districts of the province, then there were a number of development activities that were being implemented by the town/tehsil administrations and thousands of small works were being carried out by the union councils.

“Now all of the schemes, whether they were being looked after by the district governments or the tehsil administrations or the union councils, would be the responsibility of the deputy commissioners until the elected local bodies come into existence,” said the planner.

This would create a vacuum that would take many months to fill in, setting stage for a bureaucratic fatigue and a compromised quality of development activities, according to Peshawar-based officials.

“First, they wasted time and financial resources on introducing the devolution of powers system, and now they are playing the same game again, reinventing the wheel,” said a finance department official.

He said that the promise of implementing ‘bottom-up’ development planning under the devolution of powers plan remained unfulfilled. In the first two years after the introduction of the new system in 2001, he added, the then government could not manage to post development planners in the districts. “Those planners, who were posted from Peshawar to districts, did not take interest in their work as a complete chaos gripped the planning process in the province,” said the official.

He said that the ongoing development activities were set to experience troubles because no homework had been done to resolve issues likely to be confronted by the agencies and departments executing development projects in districts.

An official of the local government and rural development department, when contacted, said that the fate of the development projects being executed under the supervision of lawmakers was also unclear following the introduction of the new local government system.

“Nothing wrong is going to happen as all the development activities would continue to be looked after under the new system as they were being taken care of prior to it under the devolution of powers plan,” said an additional secretary of finance department.

He said that deputy commissioners of all the districts would be the lead officers in respect of ensuring the execution of development activities as per their respective timeline.

A senior development planner said that problems for development projects were expected to become acute once the existing assemblies complete their constitutional terms. This would add to the deputy commissioners’ responsibilities as they would also be directly taking care of the schemes initiated on the instructions of MPAs and MNAs, he added.

“Once the sitting legislators are gone following the completion of their five year constitutional term, a good number of development activities are expected to experience shortage of funds, impacting pace of work on such works,” said the official.The deputy commissioners, said the official, might not show the interest with which MNAs and MPAs pursued the provincial and federal governments to get funds released for development activities in their respective constituency.