ISLAMABAD: The government has approved a disbursement of about Rs823 million to the Gwadar Port Authority (GPA) to purchase boat engines for 3,291 poor fishermen of Gwadar.

The finance ministry would immediately release the amount to the GPA at the rate of Rs250,000 per head to buy a boat engine for each fisherman.

The decision followed a June 3 visit of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif to Gwadar Port when he announced that 2,000 engines would be provided to poor fishermen within three months.

The Prime Minister’s Office then asked the Ministry of Maritime Affairs to complete formalities to provide engines for fishing boats to deserving fishermen free of cost and to ensure that beneficiaries should be selected by transparent ballot based on well-defined criteria.

The maritime ministry processed a project case to the Planning Commission to provide 2,000 engines to the fishermen at the cost of Rs500m with an implementation period of one year.

Govt approves Rs823m for the purpose, six months after premier’s announcement

Subsequently, at a steering committee meeting on Gwadar initiatives held at the Prime Minister’s Office on July 6, a committee was formed to finalise the criteria for distributing the boat engines.

The Planning Commission was informed that the Gwadar Port Authority floated three tenders on July 6, Aug 17 and Oct 13 in the national newspapers, but none of the advertisements attracted an appropriate response according to the requisite criteria.

Resultantly, all tenders had to be scrapped.

At a Nov 23 meeting to review the progress of the Gwadar project presided over by Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal, it was decided that the option of cash transfers to deserving fishermen for buying boat engines should be considered in view of the lukewarm response to the original equipment manufacturers or bidders and the non-availability of engines on time as reported by the GPA chairman.

The meeting decided that the GPA should complete formalities as per procedure in practice on priority.

Therefore, on the request of the maritime ministry, the Economic Coordination Committee (ECC) of the cabinet allowed last week to withdraw Planning Commission’s Form-1 (PC-I) and directed it to surrender the amount of Rs500m already allocated for the initiative in the budget.

The Planning Commission was also directed to surrender an additional Rs322.75m saved from other development projects. As a consequence, the ECC approved the reappropriation of the entire amount — i.e. Rs822.75m — as a supplementary grant to the GPA to enable it to disburse in full to all 3,291 fishermen registered with the Balochistan fisheries department at the rate of Rs250,000 per head for buying boat engines.

An official said the government machinery took more than six months to process the case already approved by the prime minister on June 3 for implementation in three months, and yet it was unclear if the fishermen would be able to utilise these funds appropriately.

Published in Dawn, December 26th, 2022