In a Joint Session of Parliament, the Chairperson of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), the Member from Bardo-Trong constituency, Hon’ble Gyambo Tshering, presented the Committee’s review report on the Royal Audit Authority’s (RAA) Performance Audit Reports on Irrigation Systems and Preparedness for Cybersecurity today. 

The Chairperson submitted twelve recommendations to the House - seven on the Performance Audit Report on Irrigation Systems and five other recommendations on the Preparedness for Cybersecurity. 

The PAC recommended several measures to enhance the development and management of irrigation systems in the country. The recommendations included:

1. The Department of Water (DoW) as the lead agency to operationalize the National Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) Plan;
2. The Department of Agriculture (DoA) to review and integrate the National Irrigation Policy (NIP) 2012 into successive five-year plans to achieve food self-sufficiency and security, in collaboration with the Department of Infrastructure and Development (DoID) to adopt sustainable irrigation technologies, to maintain an updated inventory of irrigation systems, and enforce multi-disciplinary feasibility studies for irrigation schemes.
3. Water User Associations (WUAs) to be formed in line with the Water Act of Bhutan 2011, and to establish Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) among DoA, DoID, DoW, and Local Governments for coherent planning and development of irrigation facilities, ensuring both sectoral alignment and minimum infrastructure quality standards. Administrative arrangements for planning, budgeting, execution, and monitoring of irrigation infrastructure development are also emphasized under the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock (MoAL).

Following the presentation, the member from Athang-Thedtsho constituency suggested the need to include a provision to facilitate water distribution by the government concurrent to the land owned so as to resolve the prevailing conflicted situation in water distribution in villages. Member from Khamaed-Lunana, iterated that irrespective of the scale of water irrigation projects, the projects need to be undertaken by the Government to ensure  quality infrastructure construction to extend maximum benefits to the people. 

In response, the Minister for MoIT stated that the competency of the private entities has improved overtime, therefore, construction of infrastructure will be given to private entities, whereas the final assessment for quality would be carried-out by the Government as practiced presently. 

Even after investing huge amounts into constructing infrastructure in water projects in some areas by the preceding and the present government which failed to serve its purpose, the failure might be attributed to the lack of research and study, said the member from Drujeygang-Tseza. 

Several members asserted the lack of proper coordination among relevant agencies due to the recent reconstitution of the ministries and its mandates, whereby the policy aspect is overseen by MoAL and the infrastructure construction aspect by the MoIT elucidating the Committee’s recommendation for a collaboration between the two ministries.

The recommendations were unanimously endorsed in the Joint Sitting through show of hands, however, the recommendations will be adopted through a voting process as per procedure along with the deliberation on the Performance Audit Report on Preparedness for Cybersecurity and its recommendations in tomorrow's Joint Sitting.