National Vigilance Centre (NVC) is reducing its onsite inspections of the government offices to check status of service delivery as well as other programmes substantially in the current fiscal year 2018-19 due to the reduced budget.

The centre under the Prime Minister’s Office, got budget of Rs104.8 million in the current fiscal compared to Rs135.23 million received in the previous fiscal 2017-18.

The government has reduced the budget for NVC to do monitoring and evaluation to Rs2million from the last year’s Rs3.79 million, according to Finance Ministry.  

NVC Spokesperson Bishnu Raj Lamichhane said, “We are reducing the number of districts to be monitored to 20 this year from around 50 districts in the last fiscal year.”

While the budget for staff salaries and allowances has increased, the amount for monitoring and evaluating various NVC programmes, including workshops, school education and detailed investigation has been reduced this year, according to the vigilance body.

The NVC inspects whether government employees arrive their respective offices on time, deliver services to the public, and whether they wear the designated uniform. It also monitors whether government staff adhere to the citizen charters.

After monitoring the government offices, it writes to the concerned offices to take disciplinary action against those who fail to comply with rules regarding uniform and office attendance.

In the last fiscal year, 2,321 government employees violated the rule on uniform and office attendance, according to the NVC.

Regulation on the Discipline of Civil Servants requires government officials to report to office on time and wear the uniform along with the identity card.

The budget to conduct workshops, provide education on anti-corruption to students, conduct detailed study, conduct surveys among service seekers about the status of service delivery and media campaign has been reduced to Rs1.4 million this fiscal year from last fiscal’s Rs 5.26 million. The budget cut compelled the NVC to reduce the number of the workshops to six this fiscal year from last year’s 14. It organises workshops in different districts where stakeholders take part.

The NVC has trimmed the number of schools from 30 to 20 where its conducts anti-corruption education, said Lamichhane. The NVC said it usually spends Rs25,000 per school while providing education to around 80-100 students in a school. Due to lack of budget, the NVC said it will not inspect government offices for anomalies this year.

In the last fiscal year, the NVC had done a detailed study on equipment procurement by Bir Hospital, status of land plot divisions in few land revenue offices in Kathmandu and attendance of teachers in Tribhuvan University.

Lamichhane said the NVC received just Rs90,000 to conduct media campaign this fiscal year down from around Rs1 million in the last fiscal year. “So, media campaign against corruption will be very limited this fiscal year,” he said.