June 10, 2003	Tuesday	Rabi-us-Sani 9, 1424

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ISLAMABAD, June 9: The government has decided to empower the planning commission to conduct physical inspection of development projects across the country and divert allocations of slow moving projects to other sectors immediately to ensure maximum utilization of budget allocations.

Finance Minister Shaukat Aziz said in a Dawn Dialogue interview that every senior officer of the planning commission would be responsible for the physical checking of 10-20 projects and progress reports would be reviewed, first in September by ECNEC and then by the NEC in June. These reports would also be available to the media and the general public for counter checking.

He said that the budget philosophy was “very strong” this year as the government did not want fiscal or current account problems or for the reforms process to be derailed. Donors were on board and investment and growth had increased.

He said the government believed that once there was growth, stabilization would follow and objectives of higher revenue and growth would be achieved through improvements. So now the government had given a signal to investors to come forward as huge credits at cheap rates were currently available with the banking sector.

The revenue strategy was to plug loopholes, reduce rates, improve the system, offer reliefs and broaden the tax net so as to promote private sector investment, Mr Aziz said.