Eight years have passed since federalism came into force. Sudurpaschim Province now holds constitutional authority — to legislate, to budget, to choose its own projects. The difficulty is not the authority. It is the capacity to use it.
Provincial internal revenue does not cover even a tenth of provincial spending. The rest depends on federal transfers, and the size of those transfers is decided in Kathmandu. A government dependent on someone else's money cannot set its own priorities; that is not the principle of federalism, only its form.
The second problem is people. Many technical posts in the provincial ministries are vacant. Without engineers and planners, project design is outsourced to consultants — and the same understaffed office is then expected to judge the quality of what the consultants produce.
The third, and least comfortable, is the ability to spend. Last year the province managed only 63 percent of its capital budget. What the resulting end-of-year rush produces is visible in the roads that fail after every monsoon.
The national debate is stuck on whether provincial powers should be widened or narrowed. For Sudurpaschim the better question is a different one: when do we build the institutions to use the powers we already have? Granting more, before that, is pouring water into a vessel that has not been made.
