Provinces demand Rs1.35bn from Centre: Drainage programme
By Our Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD, Jan 27: The provinces have asked the federal government to arrange alternate funding or provide from its own resources about Rs1.35 billion to complete a large number of schemes affected by the World Bank's exit
from the Rs31 billion National Drainage Programme (NDP).
The sources said the federal government has indicated that the Asian Development Bank (ADB) is expected to increase its funding to the NDP to offset the negative impact of the World Bank's decision to pull out of the project.
These sources said these issues were discussed here at a meeting presided over by Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Dr Akram Sheikh and attended by provincial irrigation secretaries and the federal water and power ministry officials.
Another meeting will be held on Friday with a delegation of the ADB that would determine as to what extent the ADB would support the project. The World Bank had informed the government that its funding had reached loan closing date on December 31, 2004 and hence it could not extend the loan closing date to complete various schemes of the project due to slow utilization of funds.
The World Bank had already diverted around $100 million to Pakistan's drought relief operations last year and almost 30 per cent of its overall funding remained unutilized by the loan closing date.
The deputy chairman planning commission was informed that a number of projects in all the four provinces worth over Rs1.35 billion have either could not be started, or remained in the mid owing to World Bank's refusal to extend its loan closing date.
In Sindh province alone, the projects worth Rs700 million were affected. Of these, Rs80 million worth of projects were in progress, Rs500 million worth of projects were not yet started and another Rs150 million worth projects were in the tendering process.
The cost of Rs31.4 billion NDP was revised to Rs28.7 by the military authorities about three years ago by eliminating major consultancy portion of the programme.
The NDP launched in four provinces in 1998 was originally planned to be completed by December 2004 but the government has requested the lender agencies to extend completion date to December 2005.
Informed sources said the revised date was also unlikely to be met because the project has so far achieved only 30 per cent and 36 per cent progress in physical and financial terms respectively.
Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC), ADB and the World Bank were major lenders to the project. The JBIC has already extended its loan closing date to December 31, 2006.
The sources said the Sindh authorities also demanded that their funding for rehabilitation of irrigation system should be enhanced for the current year's allocation of Rs500m to keep the projects going with full pace.
It was, however, decided to review the utilization rate of the Sindh government in rehabilitation of irrigation system and then take a decision as to how much increase could be made and whether the pace of work really required more funding at all.
Another meeting is expected to be held within the next few days to examine the implementation status of rehabilitation works at the provincial level.
