PESHAWAR, Sept 25: The ongoing development schemes will receive funds in bulk on top priority basis during the current financial year, according to officials.

The provincial government will now divert major proportion of its total development funds to the ongoing development schemes in line with policy guidelines suggested by the World Bank — a major lender to the Frontier province.

“Considerably a large amount of funds released for carrying out development activities at the start of the current financial year was meant for development works in progress,” said a development planner of the province.

The NWFP government’s decision to incorporate about 1,000 new development schemes in the Annual Development Programme (ADP) raising the total number of schemes to well over 1300, had elicited strong reaction from within the development planners and the World Bank.

However, after being pushed hard by the donor agency the provincial government has agreed not only to revamp its ADP bringing the total number of schemes down from the current level of 1325, but has once again focussed its attention to complete the ongoing development schemes.

Officials in the planning and development department, told Dawn on Thursday that the ongoing schemes would form top priority as far as the quantum of funds to be released in financial year 2003-04 was concerned.

For early completion of the ongoing schemes, the World Bank had suggested to the provincial government that 75 per cent of the development funds should be released to the development works in progress. The bank has also suggested that the province should restructure or defer or even drop the poorly designed and non-viable projects from its ADP for the current financial year, the officials said.

Among the 1,325 development schemes, some 980 are new and remaining are ongoing works. Without making change to its original plan the province will need to raise Rs26 billion to complete these 1,325 works in a period of about four-and-a-half years given the fact the no new scheme is initiated in this period.

The lending agency, added the officials, wanted the provincial government to re-prioritize its development programme and drop as many schemes from it as possible. The benchmarks set under the ADP for the financial year 2003-04 were beyond the provincial government’s capacity to achieve, hence the ADP will end up in a fiasco, they added.