New management mechanism for Ho Chi Minh city
Jan 29 Asia Pulse - The Ho Chi Minh City People's Committee has been told it should submit a proposal to Government setting up a management mechanism specific to the city's needs by March.
Nguyen Khanh, vice-director of the Government's Administrative Reform Steering Committee, said the committee believed the present management system, run from Hanoi and applied to all areas of the country, does not make allowances for the different needs of each area and has stymied Ho Chi Minh City's development.
"We don't even have different management mechanisms for urban and rural areas," confirmed Diep Van Son, deputy director of the Government's Personnel and Organisation Commission. "All the areas share the same State management structure. We are managing urban areas with rural management systems and vice-versa. This obviously is not a recipe for efficiency," he said.
Many articles in the Land Law, for example, might be well suited to a small town, but is cumbersome, time consuming and unnecessary for an area like Ho Chi Minh City. Under this law, the city's Peoples' Committee is responsible for signing land use and house ownership certificates. While this may not be a problem for provincial Peoples' Committees, in Ho Chi Minh City it creates a huge back log in paperwork.
"It would be better if district Peoples' Committees took over this task," said Son. Members of Ho Chi Minh City's People's Committee have suggested that Central Government be responsible for approving the general outline of development plans and supervise implementation of these plans, but the city itself should be in charge of approving finer details and actual execution of the plans. In addition, they said, the city ought to have the authority to approve investment and equitisation projects.
"If the new statute goes through, the city will be in a much better position to foster development of its industrial, trade, services and handicraft sectors," said Son. Under the current management mechanism, Ho Chi Minh City is only permitted to retain 15 per cent of its revenue, despite the fact its population of more than seven million people accounts for 6.6 per cent of the nation's entire population.
"This limit should be increased to between 20 and 35 per cent," said a representative from the city's Economics Institute. The institute recommended that the city be free to do whatever it chooses with the retained funds. However, the Government could issue a general framework governing the city's spending policies.
At the moment, management training curricula's for State employees are prepared by the National Institute of Public Administration and are almost identical for all areas of the country, with each province or city allowed to change just 20 per cent of the curricular to meet their own circumstances. For big cities, Ho Chi Minh City's People's Committee argued, the percentage should be raised to 50 per cent and cities should be permitted to decide how many employees it needs for each department, sector and district based on its own budget capacity.
Last year's economic figures showed that Ho Chi Minh City played a pivotal role in the national economy, accounting for 18.9 per cent of national GDP, 29 per cent of industrial output, 46 per cent of export revenues and 34.9 per cent of the State budget.
(VNA)
