ISLAMABAD, Sept 7: The visiting president of the Asian Development Bank (ADB), Haruhiko Kurodo, has been assured by top Pakistani authorities that issues relating to governance, accountability and transparency were being given top priority to discourage corrupt practices in the country. Reliable sources told Dawn on Tuesday that while the ADB has offered $3.7 billion financial assistance for three years, Mr Kurodo wanted Pakistan to take new measures for addressing issues concerning governance, both political and economic, accountability and transparency.

The president and the prime minister during their separate meetings with the ADB president said that second-generation reforms would be implemented during the Medium Term Development Framework (MTDF) programme covering 2005-10 mainly for improving governance at all tiers of government.

The sources quoted the ADB chief as saying that prudent spending of funds, being offered by international donor agencies, could help alleviate poverty across Pakistan.

Good governance, he said, was essential to meet the objectives of providing better facilities to the Pakistani people who were far behind many developing countries.

The MTDF said: “Systematic corruption extracts a heavy price by reducing investment and increasing capital costs.”

The ADB president and his team were also told that during the MTDF period governance activities would be mainstreamed in the development process. First, the process of decentralization and devolution will be strengthened to enhance the delivery of critical municipal services. Second, participatory approaches and governance considerations will be strengthened in the design and implementation of policies, programmes and projects, with capacity building of the agencies involved. Third, the systemic problems that undermine the efficiency of legal, judicial and law enforcement institutions will be addressed. Fourth, corporate governance and public-private interface issues will be addressed to protect identified public interests while minimizing private transaction costs. Fifth, several areas of public sector management will be addressed, including streamlining revenue administration, strengthening public financial administration, streamlining E-Governance, public sector capacity building and civil service reforms, covering professionalism of civil services and qualitative improvements through continuous training and skill upgradation and enhancing the quality and coverage of data and statistics.