71 NIA offices facing abolition

CABANATUAN CITY — At least 71 provincial irrigation offices (PIOs) of the National Irrigation Administration will be abolished under the Rationalization Plan laid out by the national government for NIA, the agency’s employees’ union said.

The 9,000-strong NIA Employees Association of the Philippines (EASP) represented by its president Antonio Reyes has thus, asked President Arroyo to exempt NIA from the implementation of Executive Order 366, the implementing guidelines for the government’s rationalization scheme.

In an 11-page position paper submitted to President Arroyo, a copy of which was obtained by The STAR, the NIA EASP noted that the PIOs will be effectively abolished under the Participatory Irrigation Development Project (PIDP)’s irrigation management transfer (IMT), one of whose components is the rationalization plan.

The PIDP, a World Bank-funded scheme, the NIA EASP said, will rationalize the NIA and abolish the PIOs, merge vital departments and divisions in the NIA central office and regional offices. "In short, the PIDP shall extremely scale down irrigation development, thus, aggravating the worsening irrigation development," the position paper read.

NIA records showed that among the PIOs that will be affected by the rationalization scheme are four PIOs in Region 1, four in Region 2, seven in Region 3, five each in Regions 4-A and 4-B, six in Region 5; five in Region 6; four in Region 7; five in Region 8, two in Region 9, four in Region 10, three in Region 11, four each in Regions 12 and 13 four in the Autonomous Region for Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) and six in the Cordillera Administrative Region (CAR).

Reyes said that rationalization should focus on strengthening, not scaling down NIA personnel. He added that while NIA’s approved plantilla positions is at 11,451, only 5,640 or 49 percent has been filled up owing to a continuing directive from President Arroyo to adopt austerity measures.

He said, the NIA rationalization plan even stipulates that the agency reduces its personnel to only 3,681 positions or 32.15 percent of approved plantilla positions.

Reyes said that while a sub-management committee was created for the rationalization plan, it was not objectively prepared, saying the other vital parameters to be considered in the plan preparation were ignored, such as the failure of the devolution of communal irrigation systems (CIS) to local government units and the insignificant implementation of the IMT program.

Under the rationalization plan, he noted, various departments tasked with supervising, monitoring and controlling the field offices in the delivery of irrigation services and in the collection of irrigation service fees will be scaled down.