LAHORE, Nov 28: Funds for improvement of municipal services in the low-income tehsil municipal administrations in Punjab would be provided by the World Bank as loan which would be recovered through income from the facilities, official sources said here on Tuesday.

The loan would be provided through the provincial government and utilised by the Punjab Municipal Development Fund Company formed recently on the insistence of the World Bank which wanted participation of the community in the process for ensuring transparency and quality of development schemes.

Officials said initially the loan was being given to 18 selected TMAs for their 28 projects. The loan would be given only to the low-income TMAs and not to towns in the five city district governments of Lahore, Multan, Faisalabad, Gujranwala and Rawalpindi.

They said so far the donor agencies and the provincial government had been focusing on building institutional capacity of the TMAs.

But they realised of late that the TMA also needed support for the development of municipal services which was their main function. And to pursue this idea the government had launched the Punjab Municipal Services Improvement Project and established the Punjab Municipal Development Fund Company under it.

The company comprised leading people from the civil society, including businessmen and technocrats. It would complete projects like water supply, sewerage, streetlights, public parks, slaughterhouses, cattle markets, solid waste management, street pavement and construction of roads.

The selected TMAs had submitted 28 projects out of which 15 had been prepared by Nespak and the rest by experts hired by the World Bank.

The facility would be provided to all low-income TMAs in the province after the completion of the projects in the initially selected TMAs.

The officials said the World Bank had not fixed ceiling of the loan, but it would continue to provide it according to the requirement of the development works.