RAWALPINDI, Feb 22: The People's Rights Movement (PRM) has condemned the announcement by a visiting delegation of the World Bank (WB) headed by its vice-president for South Asia that the bank will approve a $3 billion country assistance strategy in March.

In a statement issued on Sunday, the PRM said a $300 million loan would be issued for poverty-related expenditures as described in the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP), a policy document which it said pandered to the international financial institutions (IFIs) and detailed government spending plans for the coming few years.

The PRM maintained that both the content of the PRSP and the process by which it had been formulated were seriously flawed. "After the Structural Adjustment programmes (SAPs) came under widespread criticism across the world for being poverty-enhancing and totally unlinked to the specific conditions of countries, the PRSP was put forth as being a 'country-owned document', which would be prepared by the governments themselves after lengthy consultations at national and local levels."

However, the PRSP has been conceived of and then finalized without a debate in the parliament, it added. It said the policies contained in the PRSP were against the interest of the common man.

"The neo-liberal policy paradigm in Pakistan has lead to an unprecedented increase in poverty as 40 per cent of the population now lives below the poverty line. The government and the IFIs admit that the rate of increase in poverty has been the fastest that the country has ever seen."