May 26, 2002	Sunday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 13,1423

KARACHI, May 25: The World Bank has agreed to provide $100 million interest-free assistance for Sindh reforms programme from the next financial year.

Sindh Finance Secretary Fazlur Rehman on Friday briefed a high-level meeting regarding progress of structural adjustment credit with the World Bank for supporting reforms programme.

He said that only 0.7 per cent service charges would be payable to the World Bank and the federal government agreed to provide foreign currency cover in this regard. He said 35 per cent of this assistance will be diverted on retiring loans.

The meeting was chaired by Sindh Governor Mohammadmian Soomro and attended by provincial ministers, chief secretary, secretaries concerned and high-ranking officers.

Fazlur Rehman informed the meeting that the World Bank had committed to extending this facility for another three years.

Mohammadmian Soormro himself led the provincial team during negotiations with the World Bank, the secretary finance pointed out.

The secretary said the Sindh government had remained engaged with the World Bank for seeking structural adjustment credit for deepening its reforms programme since last more than 18 months. These reforms, basically aim at reducing poverty in the province by improving public service delivery and stimulating growth.

He said the reforms programme was now focused on the following three major pillars:

1. Fiscal and debt restructuring for providing more resources to reduce poverty expenditures and infrastructure services coupled with financial management reforms to ensure that these resources are spent effectively.

ii. Improving public service delivery through civil service reforms, decentralization, and reforms in health, education, drinking water, and rehabilitation of roads for accelerating human development and

iii. Regulatory reforms, privatization and infrastructure improvements to stimulate economic revival.

Fazlur Rehman said some of the fiscal restructuring measures, which government intend to undertake are:

Provincial tax and non-tax revenues to increase by around 15 per cent annually during the medium term. Here significant strides have been made in property tax and stamp duties.

The government would be concentrating on MTV, professional tax, AIT, strengthening of cost recovery from non-merit goods for improving provincial revenues.

Other than restructuring, improving work processes “we are working on institutional strengthening by way of introducing a culture of incentives, moving towards automation, greater exchange of information on uniformity of rates in taxes have mobile bases, etc”. Sindh has in fact approached the federal government for support on MVT, collection of professional tax and strengthening of sales tax on services.

Secretary Finance said that on financial management side “we have done some work on reconciliation, posting of fiscal monitoring reports on our website, review of past audit reports by the Public Acoounts Committee (PAC) and reduction of past liabilities, etc”.—APP