ISLAMABAD, April 8: The government will be making later this month some major readjustments in development allocations for the current fiscal year to ensure full utilisation of the Rs335-billion Public Sector Development Programme which also involves Rs50 billion earthquake reconstruction plan.
A senior government official told Dawn on Sunday that the Planning Commission and the finance ministry were currently holding meetings with various ministries, divisions and provincial governments on a daily basis to see if funds could be diverted from slow- to fast-moving projects and to prioritise next year’s development projects.
The commission has carried out a detailed monitoring of 256 projects during the July-December period of the current fiscal year and evaluated 11 completed projects during July-February 2006-07. The project monitoring mechanism is being improved further with the assistance of the Asian Development Bank to ensure online connectivity with all concerned with the implementation of the projects.
As a result, the releases and expenditures of the monitored projects have increased by 10.5 per cent and 21 per cent, respectively, during July-December 2006 as compared to the corresponding period last year.
During the monitoring of top-25 strategic projects, it was found that the governance issue was a major cause for projects’ delay and cost-overruns. Twelve out of 25 projects were behind schedule and required additional investments primarily because of governance problems. Land disputes and technical difficulties were other problems.
Interestingly, 11 out of total 17 big infrastructure projects were facing governance problems. However, the Planning Commission claims to have overcome the governance problems in these projects.
In a brief report, the commission says the governance
problems were also faced in crucial projects like Mirani dam, Mangla dam upraising, Sabakzad dam, Kachhi canal, 459km Hoshab-Nag Basima-Surab road project, seven cadet colleges, 400-bed hospital in Rawalpindi, Prime Minister’s Programme for Hepatitis, Blindness, Cardiovascular diseases, etc.
The report reveals that against the target of conversion of 29 ‘B-areas’ into ‘A-areas’ in Balochistan, the government has been able to convert only 13 districts from ‘B’ to ‘A’ areas and four districts were notified as ‘A’ areas.
The government official said the utilisation capacity of executing agencies had considerably improved over the last few years but a lot more needed to be done to ensure full utilisation of the allocated funds.
He said the Planning Commission would be involving principal accounting officers of the ministries and divisions "more vigorously and on a monthly basis to ensure effective implementation of the projects".
The net PSDP for FY07, he said, had increased by 22 per cent when compared with FY06, while releases and utilisation during the first-half of 2006-07 improved by 34 per cent and 47 per cent, respectively, as compared to the same period last year.
