Indian capital to let people decide how to spend municipal budget

The new government in the Indian capital will let the people decide its annual municipal budget in a bottom-to-top way by seeking opinions of the voting constituencies who projected the anti-graft Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) to power last month, said local media reports Wednesday.

Chief minister Arvind Kejriwal, who is president of AAP, will begin a pilot project to get citizens' views for area-specific budget planning for the 2015-16 fiscal, said Times of India daily.

Five to 10 assembly constituencies will be selected next month for the "experiment plan" and the feedback will be used to shape budget allocations, said the report.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has promised to give local state and municipal governments more power in deciding their own budget plans while the national budget, to be announced next week by the central government, will guarantee the funding for the projects.

"We want to try an experiment by involving people in area- centric budget planning. It will be a policy of the people and they would make the budget," the newspaper quoted Kejriwal as saying.

"At present budgets are made each year with departments seeking a budget for their various projects. The budget amount keeps going up but a person who may have been waiting for a new road in his area for years may still not get covered. Now we want to bridge this gap and remove the discrepancies by going out to the people," he added.

The AAP came to power in a landslide victory of local legislative election by taking 67 out of 70 seats in the local assembly. Endi