September 26, 2007	Wednesday	Ramazan 13, 1428

PESHAWAR, Sept 25: The fate of more than 400 development schemes, due for completion this year, hangs in the balance because of the possibility, no matter how remote, of the dissolution of the NWFP government.

Officials at the planning and development department told Dawn that considering 2007 as an election year, the MMA government in the NWFP was eager to see completion of the maximum number of development projects before the expiry of its tenure in November this year.

For this purpose, the officials said, the government had allocated Rs21.944 billion for local component of its highest Annual Development Programme, 30 per cent more than the allocation of the fiscal year 2006-07, mainly to facilitate the completion of 407 uplift projects, which were due to be completed by June 30, 2008.

Of the total 953 projects of the local component of the ADP, 407 development schemes comprise 372 ongoing and 35 new, which will eat up Rs11.162 billion.

Officials said that leaders of the ruling alliance wanted to complete most of the ongoing and new development schemes in their respective constituencies because they feared that such projects would become redundant after the change of government as happened usually.

MMA president and Jamaat-i-Islami chief Qazi Hussain Ahmad had recently announced that lawmakers of MMA component parties would resign from national and provincial assemblies on Sept 29 against President Gen Pervez Musharraf’s plan to get himself re-elected.

This decision, if materialised accordingly, will further shorten the government’s tenure that is originally expiring on November 15. The officials, however, said that in both cases the government had been left with little time to complete these priority projects.

They said that ministers, treasury MPAs and even the Chief Minister’s Secretariat was actively pursuing the projects at different levels and making available the required funding for the execution of these projects.

“It seems that the ruling alliance is in a great hurry because they want disposing of every pending issue, including uplift projects, before the expected change,” another planner observed.

He was of the view that in such a situation, when the government was about to complete its tenure, it often ignored rules and procedures, which it considered as ‘hindrances’ in the completion of such projects.

Such a mindset, he said, was ultimately leading to sudden removal of what the rulers called ‘non-cooperative’ officers from key positions.

The provincial government, the officials said, wanted to take the maximum benefit in the forthcoming elections from the development projects executed by it during the past five years.

This can be witnessed from the ongoing inauguration and foundation-stone laying ceremonies of different projects being performed in various parts of the province either by Chief Minister Akram Khan Durrani or his cabinet colleagues.

The officials said that implementing agencies had been given guidelines to inaugurate even those hospitals, schools or other projects which were 70 per cent complete.