ISLAMABAD, May 12: Eighty two projects out of a total 192 of the federal Public Sector Development Programme (PSDP) are moving very slow and the government may soon divert allocated funds to other schemes. Informed sources told Dawn on Thursday that secretaries of the relevant ministries and divisions and provincial governments have been asked to provide revised implementation schedules of these projects within a fortnight.

Majority of these slow moving projects relate to schemes falling under the ministries of water and power, education and food, agriculture and livestock, these sources said. The Prime Minister’s Committee on Project Monitoring held its second meeting here on Thursday to review the overall progress on projects and examine bottlenecks in their implementation.

The meeting was also attended by the deputy chairman Planning Commission, federal secretaries of relevant ministries and provincial ministers for finance and planning.

The sources said the meeting reviewed the implementation status of 192 projects having total cost of Rs500 million and above and noted that 82 projects were moving very slowly. The delays were mainly attributed to law and order and problems relating to land acquisition.

The meeting decided to assign the responsibility of these projects to the relevant secretaries who would be required to submit their recommendations within a fortnight as to how to remove bottlenecks and speed up their implementation.

The next meeting of the committee, likely to be held before the end of this month, would consider these recommendations and if problems could not be resolved immediately, their allocated funds would be diverted to other deserving projects.

It was noted that most of the water and power sector, education and lining of water courses projects of the ministry of food, agriculture and livestock were in the slow moving category.

Right Bank Outfall Drainage (RBOD) and Left Bank Outfall Drainage (LBOD) project are also among the slow moving projects, the sources said.

The secretaries were also asked to give revised completion schedules of these projects so that their allocations could be spread according to new schedule.

The meeting was also informed that although the schedule of utilization of funds varied from project to project, the huge withdrawals of funds in the month of June would result in huge leakages and compromise the quality work.

The meeting also reached to the conclusion that some mechanisms would have to be worked out so that huge withdrawals did not take place in the last month of the financial year even though funds for mega development projects did not lapse.