ISLAMABAD, May 13: The government has decided in principle to shelve a plan to send 50 senior bureaucrats for training to a top US university this year after finding that officers sent earlier had produced no better results.

The Establishment Division has so far sent 145 officers under the Executive Development Programme (EDP) to the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. However, the performance of these officers has seen no improvement, sources told Dawn.

They said the National Commission on Government Reforms headed by former State Bank Governor Dr Ishrat Hussain had opposed sending of BPS-20/21 officers to the US for training in governance. The commission was of the view that such trips had hardly improved the capacity and performance of the public servants and was just an avoidable loss to the national exchequer.

“Now, there is strong opposition to this programme as it has been used as picnic trips by officers. It is most likely that the last batch may not make to the US,” a source said.

In 2004, the World Bank had initiated the $55 million programme for the capacity building of Pakistani bureaucrats under the Public Sector Capacity Building Project, of which $25 million was allocated to the Establishment Division - a good chunk of which to be utilised for sending officers for training abroad.

The programme aimed to train 200 BPS-20 to BPS-21 officers in the US. Participants are sent for five weeks to Harvard costing about $25,000 per person.

Sources said even those officers who had completed their training in the US had, on their return, proposed to the authorities that the programme should either be shelved or training arrangements should be organised in other less expensive European universities or some institutions in Singapore, etc. However, it took longer for the Establishment Division to realise the problem.

They said the programme was a classic example of how money lent by international financial institutions was spent without any performance evaluation.

There is simply no criterion with the Establishment Division to gauge the performance of officers who have benefited from the programme, an official told Dawn.

The last batch of 50 officers selected under the programme who were likely to be dropped include seven females. Seven of the officers are from BPS-21 and 43 from BPS-20.

The batch comprised 32 officers from Punjab, six from Sindh, four from NWFP, five from Balochistan and three from Azad Jammu Kashmir (AJK).

No officer has been selected from the Northern Areas and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata).