April 30, 2007	Monday	Rabi-us-Sani 12, 1428

The governance reforms initiated by the Punjab government back in 2003 to improve and upgrade social and economic infrastructure in the province for reducing poverty have begun to yield fruits. So claims the government.

Having benchmarked itself against the poverty reduction target over the next five to eight years, the provincial government expects the incidence of poverty to drop down to a single digit figure by 2015.

The participants of the 4th Punjab Development Forum (PDF) organised under the banner of the Punjab Resource Management Programme (PRMP) last week were told that Punjab was committed to bring down incidence of poverty to 12 per cent to meet poverty related Millennium Development Goal for the province from the alarming level of 32 per cent that it had climbed to in 2001-02

In line with its overarching theme – Targeting Poverty, Punjab Planning and Development Board Chairman Suleman Ghani told the Forum that the provincial government has managed to achieve a sharp reduction in poverty of about 11per cent in the last five years.

“Taking into account our robust Poverty Reduction Policy Framework, the supporting medium-term allocations for the pro-poor sectors, the sustained high growth rates and specific interventions for the bottom-poor, we are expecting poverty in Punjab to come down to 16 per cent by the year 2009-10. This would mean that our MDG poverty reduction target would have been met by the year 2013 and the incidence of poverty in Punjab would have come down to a single digit figure by the year 2015,” Mr Ghani said in his policy statement, which spells out the government’s development priorities and policies, at the PDF.

He told the Forum that the provincial government planned to increasingly focus on the most vulnerable sections of society – the very poor, the marginalized and the dispossessed. Some of the targeted interventions designed for the bottom-poor include food subsidies, income transfer mechanisms, and other social protection interventions like small land grants.

The provincial government also claims that it has stayed course on its commitment to achieve Millennium Development Goals it had benchmarked itself against at last year, and expects to attain all the targets before or by 2015.

The provincial economy is on the path of steady growth and provincial GDP is growing at a rate of over seven per cent for the last several years, he claimed. This growth is being translated into creation of employment, backed by a robust demand in the economy and increasing business activity, he said.

“We estimate that in the last three years over three million new jobs have been created in Punjab. The latest labour force survey of the government of Pakistan shows that the unemployment rate in Punjab has fallen from 8.51 per cent in the year 2001-02 to 5.26 per cent in the year 2005-06,” he said.

Besides, Mr Ghani stated, over the last few years there has been a considerable improvement in the quality of life of people in the province. For example, he said, the literacy rate is estimated to have increased to 62 per cent in 2006-07 as compared to 47 per cent in 2001-02. Over a period of seven years, from 1998-99 to 2004-05, the percentage of households living in one room has gone down from 32 per cent to 25 per cent. In the last four years the percentage of households using gas or oil as cooking fuel has increased by 10 per cent. During the same period the percentage of population utilising tap water in houses has improved by more than 12 per cent.

The gains achieved during the last four years were attributed in all subsequent presentations made at the Forum to the government’s commitment to stay the course of governance reforms as well as upgrade and improve the social and economic infrastructure to facilitate growth and employment generation for poverty alleviation.

Since the first PDF was organised in 2003, the Forum is used by the government to spell out its progress on the governance reforms and its development priorities and strategies for future in the presence of what provincial administration describes as its development partners – multilateral donors like the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank.

In the absence of some room at the Forum for an “alternate view” on reforms and development priorities and strategies of the government, the entire activity is reduced to merely public relation exercise.

The impact of governance reforms and the data related to economic and social development presented before the participants is processed from the government’s own sources. In the absence of independent data collection and its appraisal, it is difficult to assess the exact impact of the governance reforms on the quality of life of citizens of the province, or challenge the claims made by the officials. A senior official of the UK’s DFID, one of the development partners of the provincial government, says: “The quality of data generated by the government at the Forum has improved (over the years). But it will be far more credible to present third party (not donors’) assessments – like a small business owner presenting the impact of reforms on his day-to-day working or a large investor commenting on investment climate reforms. That’ll really lend credibility to the reforms and the official claims about their impact.”

The government’s reluctance to allow space to independent, alternate, and different perspective on its development strategies and priorities is also reflective of the lack of commitment on its part to involve people and their intermediary organisations in designing and evaluating its policies, which is considered to be a precondition for the success of public sector reforms.

“Reforms agenda should not be treated as a property of one group or the other. Development by its very nature has to be bipartisan. The reforms and development agenda has to be owned by the people across the political divide. It not only brings sustainability to the reforms, but also adds value. It helps decision-makers as well as those affected by their decision,” a government official, who asked not to be named, commented.

There needs to be a communication strategy to discuss key reform programmes with both the ruling and opposition politicians. At the same time the government needs to communicate with civil society, academia and private sector. At the moment it has no structured system for such communication.

“Public participation in the designing and evaluation of reforms actually deepens their impact, and spurs the process of development. The government must listen to the opposing views, correct its policies accordingly, and report back to the people how their and their representatives’ views have been considered in the policy making processes,” the official said.

The government’s reluctance to involve public in the policy making process is more likely to veer its focus off those affected by its development priorities and strategies. This very possibility was amply pointed out by rights activist Feryal Ali Gauhar when she said: “What seems to be missing in this entire discourse is the paramount importance of human life, of human potential and achievement, of human happiness. We need to re-contextualise this debate within the larger framework of human rights and development. There can be no development without addressing the issues of rights, needs, and priorities. The question to be asked today is: Development of what and for whom?

“We need to listen to the voices of the marginalised; we need to understand the priorities of the people.”

“Our country shall not meet MDGs by the year 2015 – we shall not be able to reduce hunger by half or to save infants and mothers from dieing in the birth process. However, listening to the presentations today at the Punjab Development Forum, I can honestly say that even without achieving a single one of MDGs, we shall still have the finest IT Park in South Asia, and we shall have ever-widening roads on which to run our ever-expanding retinue of luxury cars.”