PESHAWAR, Sept 21: The NWFP government agencies' are facing pressure after their failure to achieve the target of completion of development projects by June 30, sources told Dawn on Monday.
The government, according to the sources, missed the target of completion of projects for the last financial year with a big gap. "This is not for the first time that the government has failed to complete the number of projects according to the target," said a development planner.
The government, the sources said, had set a target of completion of 414 development projects by June 30. Of those, 52 had to be completed in 2002-03 but the government failed to do so.
The number of incomplete projects on June 30, 2004, increased to 101 as 313 of the 414 schemes were completed.. The failure has been attributed to the government's decision to include a larger number of projects in its annual development programme than the previous year.
"A majority of the schemes that remained incomplete pertained to the services sector, chiefly the education sector," the sources said. Procedural hindrance in the execution of the projects because of delayin approval of their PC-1s and disbursement of funds were other main reasons for the government's failure to achieve the target, they said.
"The executing agencies lacked the capacity to handle such a large number of projects," said the planner. The results showed that the education department lacked the capacity to deal with such a number of projects, he said.
The provincial government received substantial funding from international donor agencies, mainly the World Bank, for the education sector. More than 300 of the 414 projects that were supposed to be completed by June 30 belonged to the school and literacy and the higher education departments.
"About 90of those projects could not be completed," said an official. The province has set an all time high ADP of over Rs16 billion for 2004-05, involving 1,198 local and about 40 foreign funded projects.
