The PLGA 2022 brings a lot to the table. But will it meet the same fate as previous attempts to enshrine a third tier of political and economic governance?
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By Abdullah Niazi
t will be hell to implement, but the recently passed Punjab Local Government Bill (PLGA) 2022 has taken another step towards an entrenched, empowered, third tier of government. The Act, which has been one of the first and few things on the legislative agenda of a weakened Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) government in the Punjab, has stripped the chief minister of his discretionary power to dissolve local councils, has placed land development authorities under the jurisdiction of Municipal Councils, has placed organisations like WASA
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and TEPA as well as local taxation under the control of the mayors of each district, and has formed the Punjab Local Government Commission. All of these are progressive moves. Yet this is not the first time an ambitious local government Act has been passed through the Punjab assembly. In 2019, the Buzdar-led Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) administration in Punjab had bulldozed the Local Government Act, 2019, and the Village Panchayat and Neighbourhood Councils (VPNC) Act, 2019 through the provincial assembly on the direct instruction of then prime minister Imran Khan. Empowering local bodies has long been a talking point of Khan, and to his credit one
of the first things he attempted to do when his party first came to power in KP in 2013 was to try and set-up a local government system. That experiment of course, as we will see later in the story, was a trainwreck inside a dumpster fire - with funds not being dispersed and local representatives completely toothless. But Khan learned from those mistakes and the 2019 Act that was passed through the Punjab Assembly was progressive, ambitious, and took the issues head on. While he was criticised for dismissing more than 58,000 sitting local government representatives, the Act itself was largely seen as a step in the right direction even by his opponents. Yet over the three years that his party was in power in Punjab, rather than the Act
