The Supreme Court (SC) has issued an interim order instructing to not spend the money allocated for the Constituency Development Fund (CDF), also known as the Local Infrastructure Partnership and Development Program, this year.
The constitutional bench including Chief Justice (CJ) Bishowambhar Prasad Shrestha, Ishwore Khatiwada, Ananda Mohan Bhattarai, Prakash Singh Raut and Anil Kumar Sinha on Wednesday has issued the interim order prohibiting spending of the allocated money until the writ petition against the CDF is finalized.
The SC has stopped the lawmakers from stopping the budget allocated for the CDF pointing that the Constitution has not handed over the responsibility of doing development and other works meant to be done by the executive to the federal and provincial lawmakers. It has reasoned that there can be conflict of interests if the lawmaker herself were to allocate fund for even projects in her electoral constituency not recommended by the National Planning Commission and the Finance Ministry, and such works do not promote good governance.
The petition was filed by advocate Trilok Bahadur Chand making the government and the federal parliament secretariat as defendants.
Finance Minister Prakash Sharan Mahat had allocated Rs 50 million to each federal constituency to be spent by the lawmaker elected through the First-Past-The-Post Electoral System in the budget he brought on May 29. He had allocated over Rs 8 billion for the CDF in the budget for the current fiscal year.
