ISLAMABAD, July 8: The federal government has refused to accord approval to Sindh government's Rs3.5 billion Population Welfare Programme "because of a number of flaws in it."

Official sources told Dawn here on Thursday that the Planning Commission has asked the Sindh government to improve PC-1 of the three-year programme and re-submit it for approval in the second week of this month.

Deputy Chairman of Planning Commission, Dr Akram Sheikh, expressed dissatisfaction over the way the project is planned to be run, the sources said. In a recently held meeting, he regretted that proper persons had not been selected for the execution of the programme.

"It was clear that the key persons were not equipped with the basic information about the programme," the deputy chairman was quoted as having said at the meeting. The Planning Commission opposed the Sindh government's view that divisional or regional administrative tier allowed to be created to execute the population welfare programme was in the light of the past performance.

"This type of an administrative tier historically creates additional hurdles in the implementation of a service delivery programme like population welfare," he said, according to the minutes of the meeting obtained by this correspondent.

The meeting, while considering the PC-1s of population programmes of Punjab, the NWFP and Fata, did not agree with the tier proposed by the Sindh government.

The additional secretary, population welfare department, Sindh, while justifying the divisional or regional tier held that the Sindh provincial department faced peculiar conditions like the size of population of Karachi which was very large and population growth was also higher as compared to rural areas of the province, therefore (the situation) demanded a senior post for the city population programme of Karachi.

The deputy chairman, while disagreeing with the argument, observed that more administrative tiers for social sector programmes like population, added burden instead of facilitating the service providers.

He said that the population welfare programme should focus more on strengthening the service delivery system to match the increasing demand for family planning services.

He observed that the population programme was operating since long through development budget, which should have been transferred to the recurring budget. "Financing of an ongoing activity through development budget is not justified," he said.

The deputy chairman asked the sponsors of the programme about the number of children per women in Karachi as well as in the rural areas of Sindh. The sponsors could not answer the query.

On the suggestion of the chief economist, Planning Commission, the sponsors agreed to make a detailed presentation, covering the performance of the programme during the last five-year period (1998-2003).

It will include financial, physical and contraceptive performance and issues/constraints confronted and remedial measures adopted in the light of the lesson learnt. The presentation will focus on the improvements made in the demographic indicators.