During his recent visit to Quetta, Prime Minister Imran Khan said as its foremost duty his government is on a course of completing its welfare agenda for the upliftment of the downtrodden and the prosperity of the neglected areas. And towards that end, a special package for the development of southern Balochistan is in the offing.

The size of the package has not been announced though unidentified official sources put it at around Rs150 billion. The package, they say, would include the former Federally Administered Tribal Areas.

Planning and development minister Asad Umar who accompanied the prime minister to Quetta has stayed back and is visiting the Makran division to consult the local authorities and stakeholders on the package.

The special package for southern Balochistan is expected to be announced by the prime minister during his visit to Gwadar next month.

The Balochistan government has also been asked by Imran Khan to define priorities which will create revenues and open up employment opportunities in the province.

The move for the upliftment of underdeveloped Balochistan was preceded by a three-year Rs1.1 trillion Karachi Transformation Package launched by the centre with Sindh’s commitment to contribute some Rs750bn.

Four out of five energy projects funded by the Asian Development Bank are facing serious bottlenecks in implementation and are at risk of cost escalation

It may also be noted that while sharing many common concerns, each province has its own specific problems requiring different sets of solutions. For example, Sindh has started looking at devolution in a different way. The provincial government has agreed in principle with business leaders to devolve the collection of property tax to Sindh Industrial Trading Estate (SITE) Ltd to improve the use of collected funds for the development of SITE-managed industrial area.

Without questioning the merit of the proposal, it is, however, no substitute to empowered representatives of local bodies — with relevance to all four provinces — to address grassroots problems.

To promote the information technology industry, Chief Minister Murad Ali Shah plans to set up software technology parks at all divisional headquarters in the province.

Inheriting a daunting, persisting and challenging economic environment, the PTI’s performance in Khyber Pakhtunkwa — where it has ruled for past seven years — or in Punjab for the past two years, has set no example for other provinces to emulate. In fact, there is a strong perception that Punjab’s performance under PTI rule has been below par when compared to that of the preceding PML-N government.

Similarly, the World Bank (WB) has expressed its concern over delays in the execution of various federal projects funded by it and urged the authorities to remove bottlenecks and expedite their implementation. The WB’s 52 projects’ portfolio is worth $10.6bn: $6bn for the centre, $1.9bn for Punjab, Rs1.9bn for Sindh, $0.4bn for Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and $0.2bn for Balochistan.

These projects pertain to the provision of water, power, education, health, roads and social protection. Pakistan’s human capital and research rankings have declined in the Global Innovation Index (GII) for 2020.

In the case of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) four out of five funded energy projects for improving the power transmission and distribution sector, are facing serious bottlenecks in implementation. They are described as being at ‘risk’ of leading to cost escalation. Only one small transmission project worth $81 million out of the ADB $1.7bn overall investment in the energy sector, was reported to be on track.

All these projects are crucial to cut transmission and distribution losses, improve cost recovery of electricity sold and reduce the swelling circular debt. These improvements will ultimately benefit electricity consumers.

However, there are encouraging signs that the PTI government is making fresh efforts to remove the bottlenecks and ensure smooth project implementation. A number of meetings were organised recently in Islamabad with the participation of all stakeholders to review progress separately on the ongoing WB and ADB projects. Federal Minister

for Economic Affairs Makhdum Khusro Bakhtyar, who chaired the meetings, directed the concerned authorities to expedite pending actions including timely disbursement of finances to complete the projects.

But the participants felt that the prime minister’s intervention was necessary to achieve desired results. Facing various bottlenecks such as manpower issues, land acquisition, bidding, operational and management challenges, most of the projects have been showing slow to no progress.

Noteworthy, however, was the satisfactory progress reported in the execution of ADB projects worth $905m in the field of communications, highways and customs border management. The ADB investment portfolio is worth around Rs6.6bn.

Owing to delayed project execution the annual federal public sector development programme (PSDP) was not fully implemented last year. The performance was particularly affected by the outbreak of coronavirus, lockdown and consequently less than targeted spending in the last quarter of 2019-20.

According to the Ministry of Planning and Development, the federal PSDP released up to June 30, 2020, amounted to Rs644.7bn against the budgeted allocation of Rs701bn (92 per cent). The Ministry of Finance on August 12 revealed that the actual development spending during the last fiscal year was Rs467.7bn, recording a gap of Rs177bn between financial releases and actual spending.

In a contracting economy, the decline in development spending has not helped to stimulate economic activities in the private sector. The annual Global Innovation Index (GII), jointly prepared by the World Intellectual Property Organisation, a western university and a business school, shows Pakistan’s ability to attract investment also weakened during 2020. The country’s business innovation ranking on GII fell in 2020 to 107 from 104 in 2019.

The annual evaluation is done on the basis of innovation in the country’s institutions, human capital and research, infrastructure, market and business sophistication, knowledge and technology transfer outputs and creative outputs. The ranking in market sophistication dipped from 102 in 2019 to 116 in 2020.

However, in the year under review, a positive improvement was recorded in terms of business sophistication ranking from 96 to 87. It came on the back of innovation linkages between universities and industry, research and knowledge absorption through high IT imports.

An encouraging move in this regard is the proposed establishment of a new state-of-the-art technology university that will provide a platform for research and innovation, including a technology park, leading to the country’s industrial development. The project has been initiated by the National University of Science and Technology.

No less important, the PTI government is making fresh efforts to manage smooth and effective implementation of its welfare agenda, policies and projects.

Published in Dawn, The Business and Finance Weekly, September 21st, 2020