Taulihawa, Kapilvastu: Mohammad Jahid Khan is the chairperson of Kapilvastu Municipality Ward Number 1. In his last two years of serving as the ward chair, Khan has received love and affection from the people as well as criticism for not being able to do as per their expectations. “People think that a wada adhaksya [ward chair] is capable of doing everything and that he has all the powers in his hands,” said Khan. But the reality is not so, there is a process for everything, there are legal norms to follow and there are budgetary constraints, Khan explained.
According to him, the scale of pressure a ward chair faces is huge because the ward chair is closer to the people of his ward, much closer than the mayor or deputy mayor and so the people of his ward consider him to be the first point of contact. “If the light goes out, they do not call at the no-light center of the Nepal Electricity Authority. They call me and ask me to fix it. You are our adhyakshya. Who else would we complain to? They say,” said Khan.
On such occasions, Khan immediately contacts the NEA office in Kapilvastu and tries to get the problem solved as soon as possible. But this is not always easy. Once light went out at the settlement area right opposite his house across the road, while the light was on at his house. An electric pole had fallen due to the wind and the NEA team was working to fix it. But it was very hot and people got impatient. Then they came to his house in the middle of the night. “They came in front of my house in a big number and said ‘how is it that light is gone in our area while your house is still powered? I did not know what to say,” explained Khan. Khan explained the reason for the power outage in their settlement but they were not convinced. “They did not believe me. They said they would come to my house to sleep under the fan. How would I be able to accommodate all of them? I breathed a sigh of relief when the repair works were done and power was restored.”
As a ward chair, Khan has to face a number of situations in which people expect him to solve the problems immediately but which he cannot because of limitations. “If a dog dies or if stray cattle die they expect me to reach the spot and get the corpses removed. Or if there is a dispute between spouses, they want me to reach the household and adjudicate.” He manages to address such problems immediately by reaching the spots immediately but when people don’t get fertilizers or when it comes to obtaining citizenship, he cannot do much and act fast because there is a process involved in it. “But the people don’t understand it, they think the ward chair is capable of doing everything,” he said.
According to him, the tendency of filing complaints accusing embezzlement of funds even in small projects has tied the hands of the local leaders. “Ward office cannot work freely because these days even on small projects worth Rs 50,000 and 1,00,000 complaints are filed at the CIAA. The fear of the CIAA looms on their minds all the time.”
Khan says that most people think the ward chairs ought to be in people’s service round the clock as if they have no personal and private lives. “I get phone calls at 12:00 and 1:00 at midnight and if I don’t pick the phone, they will chide me the next day. If I do, they will sometimes have problems which I cannot solve at all, for example lost goods, power cuts, school fees etc,” said Khan. “There is no Saturday and Sunday for ward chairs, they are everyday on duty.”
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