ISLAMABAD: The Planning Commission is facing acute shortage of human resource and performing its key functions on a makeshift basis, even though it has expanded its role and profile across the government set-up through Vision 2025 and China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).

“Human resource is our big problem,” said planning and development secretary Shoaib Siddiqui, adding the Planning Commission had only one full-time project director instead of about 33. According to him, every project costing more than Rs500 million should have a full-time project director.

Mr Siddiqui, however, explained that the responsibility to monitor all such projects had currently been given to chiefs or deputy chiefs on a ‘look-after’ basis, but conceded that such an arrangement did not deliver quality.

He was speaking to journalists on the overall role of the Planning Commission and the ministry and also talked about major initiatives, including the $56 billion CPEC. The commission, he said, had already started working on the 12th five-year plan 2018-23 that would be placed before the National Economic Council (NEC) for approval, along with the next year’s annual plan.

Body has only one full-time project director instead of 33

He said the recruitment of officer cadre was outside the planning ministry’s domain and the Federal Public Service Commission had recently selected a few officers. He agreed that criteria, experience and government salaries for new officers had a mismatch and fresh recruitments also remained blocked for years.

Another official pointed out that the Planning Commission had eight top level positions and six of them were currently vacant.

Mr Siddiqui said the posts were being filled and Planning Commission deputy chairman Sartaj Aziz was personally involved in interviewing suitable candidates.

Another official said there were 33 PSDP-funded projects of the planning and development ministry. Ironically, the all important CPEC support project and Vision 2025 are also without full-time project directors.

The official said that in the absence of full-time project directors, chiefs, deputy chiefs and heads of the sections concerned were working as project directors on a ‘look-after’ basis, in addition to their normal job requirement, overburdening them with additional workload and compromising quality outcomes.

Mr Siddiqui said the quality of consultants was also a major issue. “The consultants are not playing the role they are required to,” he said, adding that it was the responsibility of the consultants to monitor project implementation in line with approvals and standards and submit regular reports to the government outside the official system, but they had serious shortcomings.

He said he was calling all consultants like Nespak, ECIL, EA Consulting and AA Consultants to sensitise them to play their watchdog role and submit objective reports. He said the ministry and the Planning Commission had now moved to a new horizon to push stuck up projects, discourage project revisions and improve overall plan implementation.

“We are trying to activate stuck up projects and complete them as early as possible” because project delays had cost overruns. For this, he said timelines were set and provinces were encouraged to bring up their held up projects for early resolution of their issues. He said the Planning Commission had issued memorandum to the chief of a section for not completing a project within the deadline after its approval by the Central Development Working Party.

He said meetings of the Central Development Working Party and the Executive Committee of the National Economic Council (Ecnec) were being called regularly to ensure smooth processing of projects and their approvals, and there were no pending cases awaiting approvals. Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi had presided over three meetings of Ecnec in a short span of two months, he added.

Talking about the CPEC, the planning secretary said the initiative had already achieved substantial progress and the remaining matters like economic zones were being fast-tracked.

In reply to question about delay in finalising project papers for $8 billion Main Lane-1 of Pakistan Railways, Mr Siddiqui said the Planning Commission was trying to speed up the project under the given situation and had asked the railway division and Chinese authorities to complete the planning for the first phase by October 15.

He said funding arrangements for the project were yet to be finalised, but even if the government was finally required to make it part of the PSDP, every effort would be made to ensure it did not affect other development projects. He said the creation of a special purpose vehicle (SPV) was also one of the options for its financing, but the economic affairs division, railways and Chinese authorities were currently working on those areas.

The ML-1 project for improvement of railways was planned to be completed in two phases between 2016 and 2020, but its preliminary design could not be finalised. As a result, neither the project cost nor its implementation schedule is final. It will come under discussion at the next CPEC review meeting in Beijing next month.

Published in Dawn, September 28th, 2017