ISLAMABAD   -    Ministry of Interior decided to constitute local government board with an aim to look after day-to-day affairs of Metropolitan Corporation Islamabad.

Constitution of the board is provided in Section 98 of the Islamabad Capital Territory Local Government Act, 2015 according to which the chief commissioner Islamabad shall act as its ex-officio chairman while the federal government would appoint 3 to 5 members and a secretary to deal with administration of the board.

According to the provision, the board is entitled to make appointments and transfers; take disciplinary action and deal with other service matters in respect of members of the prescribed local government service cadre.

A meeting in this regard was held at the Ministry of Interior, which was attended by the joint secretaries of the ministry for CDA and ICT, chief officer MCI and member administration CDA. The committee has decided to send a summary for constitution of the board by Interior Ministry to federal government.

Reliable sources said that the motive behind constitution of the board was to cripple down powers of the Mayor Islamabad, who is currently controlling several departments of MCI. However, on the other side, Mayor of Islamabad Shaikh Ansar Aziz has quite different impression about this board and he considers it as useless and having no effect on its existing subordinate departments.

He said that constitution of the board did not mean that all the departments of MCI would go under the control of local government board but only few employees of prescribed local government service cadre would be controlled by said body.

“The capital’s local government act was copied from Punjab where a number of local bodies exist and the Punjab local government board looks after their affairs”, he explained, adding: “There are hardly few employees of prescribed local government service cadre who were appointed in old rural union councils in Islamabad”.

The MCI is facing several financial and administrative issues since its establishment but the situation has become worse after the formation of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf government following general elections in 2018.

After the first ever elections of local government elections in Islamabad, nearly all of the CDA’s functions other than planning and engineering are supposed to be devolved to the MCI. However, the government has not yet framed the MCI’s rules of establishment or business, nor has it formed a local government board.

According to the Local Government Act, 23 and 15 CDA departments, respectively, were to be fully and partially devolved to the MCI. The partial devolutions have not been carried out so far.

Sources informed that it was decided in the same meeting to devolve further the said 15 departments to MCI to complete the devolution process between two organisations.