Projects costing RS 500 million and above of the federation and the provincial projects of the same size requiring federal and/or foreign financing are approved by this forum. Before going to the Ecnec the projects are appraised in technical and economic terms by the Planning Commission and cleared by the Central Development Working Party (CDWP), again a federal-provincial body, chaired by the deputy chairman of prime minister. That he is also the finance minister is only a technical explanation.
It is a high visibility forum for announcing mega and other projects to be funded by the federal government. To be here means exactly what it should: there is no knowing whether the project so approved will find a place in the Public Sector Development Programme (PSDP) and that the Priorities Committee headed by a lowly minion of the finance ministry as part of the budget preparation process would see it as a priority deserving of adequate funding. There can be a big time gap between these goalposts.
In the meantime, the political capital has been made out of the announcement of approval. Expectations have been raised, especially those of the less developed provinces, who tend to believe anything approved at a forum chaired by the chief executive need not require any other approvals.
It must be some kind of a record for a regime waxing eloquent about the virtues of deregulation, liberalisation and privatisation that upwards of 400 projects have been approved for public sector financing, costing something approaching a trillion rupees. A meeting that used to be held four times a year has been taking place every second month and, more recently, every month. The latter happening reflects some concern to put in the pipeline favourites that a new regime might think differently about. So the boast that as many as 68 projects were approved in September and October alone has to be taken with a pinch of salt.
On the whole, the projects that were rejected in the past three years can be counted on the fingers of one hand. It will be difficult to assume that all projects presented to the Ecnec were too great to face rejection. Nobody was turned away and a significant number of the projects were not part of any plan, much less the routinely ignored Medium Term Development Framework (MTDF) 2005-10. For example, the MTDF identified two projects for women in agriculture sector, but the ministry of agriculture never bothered to prepare these projects for the Eenec approval.
Belatedly in the last two Ecnecs there has been some focus on energy forced by the perfectly predictable crisis. (Just about this time Lahore, where I write these lines, drowned in pitched darkness for half an hour. Perhaps the winter of our discontent is setting in) The sector had been earmarked for the private sector, the policies for which fall under the purview of the Economic Coordination Committee (ECC) of the Cabinet.
Private sector had been chased away by the misguided reopening of the agreements with the Independent Power Producers (IPPs). The private sector did not show any inclination to return until the power policy offered effectively much more in terms of incentives than the much maligned Benazir Power Policy. However, while the Benazir Policy ended load-shedding, the latest policy was prepared in a summer of load shedding gifted to the nation by an energy-myopic ECNEC.
As a matter of fact, Wapda was stopped from starting any new project as, in addition to energy being the exclusive preserve of the private sector. Wapda itself was threatened with privatisation. While supply was not planned to be increased by the public sector, there never was any Ecnec project to promote efficient use of energy either, an activity which lies in the public domain even in the eyes of rabid privatisers.
It seems that roads have been the first love of the Ecnec corridors, overheads, underpasses, highways and even the much-maligned motorways of the Nawaz Sharif variety. Again, approval with a bang is one thing and allocation and release of money another. Reports indicate that out of the 20 new roads sector projects included in the current year’s PSDP, only two were released money. Total cost of these projects is Rs 109 billion and the money allocated for the first year was only Rs2.3 billion; the releases were a pittance. If this is the state of the projects already approved and included in the PSDP, the fate of the projects just approved by the Ecnec is anybody’s guess.
In regard to the release of money, the fault does not always lie with the finance ministry. If the executing agency fails to complete the necessary paper work and prepare the required cash plans, then it has only itself to blame. This system was introduced some years ago to fund projects in accordance with their cash demand cycle in place of a system which sometime provided money when it was not required and denied it at crucial moments. It places more responsibility with the principal accounting officers which invariably are the secretaries, a responsibility they reluctantly discharge in an environment where, in their view, the politicians decide but the secretaries are called to account.
The Ecnec also approved the project called “ Clean drinking water for all.” No details are given in the announcement. It may, however, be recalled that this project was launched with great fanfare in 2005 and the public was told that every union council would have a water purification plant by the end of December 2007. The enthusiasts were warned about its unrealism at that time. More than drinking water, it has degenerated into a programme to import water purification plants, many of them shown every now and then in news photographs as relics from some distant past.
Finally, something that I have always thought should be done, has been done. In my view - and I think this view developed in our discussions when Sikandar Jamali was a member of the Planning Commission - it is important to set up institutions of higher learning in Balochistan, but it is perhaps more important to give a sizeable number of scholarships to students from Balochistan in quality institutions in other provinces and abroad. This is how the province will eventually get its own reservoir of brainpower to ensure quality of instruction and management in its institutions. Hopefully, the HEC project approved to provide 2000 scholarships to the students from Balochistan and FATA will be the first big step in this strategic direction.