The newly elected local body members, many of them fresh out of college, have a set of online classes in store, aimed at easing them into local administration. The Kerala Institute of Local Administration (KILA), which handles the training programme for local body members across the State, has been for the past six months preparing and fine tuning its online course, a shift necessitated by COVID-19.
Till 2015, KILA used to organise classroom sessions for the newly elected members. Considering the sheer number of elected members at the panchayats and municipalities, this process of primary-level training used to take months. Now, the institute has readied more than 50 short video clips, of durations ranging from 6 minutes to 18 minutes, touching upon the various aspects of local governance.
70% new members
"This time, the estimate is that we have more than 70% of new members across the local bodies. So, there is a dearth of experienced hands within the respective councils to guide them. This increases KILA's responsibility. Sessions are arranged on all basic responsibilities of the members and the new areas to focus on," says Mathew Andrews, Assistant Director, KILA.
In addition to the training in the usual domains including public administration and planning, a new focus area will be social justice, to evolve a gender-friendly and old age-friendly local governance model. A separate module on waste management has also been introduced.
Big screens will be set up in the respective local bodies, where the elected members can attend the sessions streamed from KILA. The sessions are expected to be held for four days in the first week of January, for 2 hours in the mornings. An hour after each of the two hour sessions is set aside for clearing the doubts. KILA will have to resource persons in each local body to coordinate the activities.
Eight handbooks
KILA has prepared eight handbooks of more than 200 pages each on various aspects of local administration. Three of them- on social justice, gender and local governance and waste management - are common for all local bodies, while separate books on public administration, decentralised planning, finance management, social welfare measures and public works have been prepared for the grama panchayats, block panchayats and urban local bodies.
After the primary training, additional training in planning and other aspects will be held a few weeks later. As the budgets for the local bodies are expected to be presented earlier in the election year, KILA has to immediately provide training in budget preparation for the finance standing committee members.
