More expenditure on development
By TANVIR ZAHID
Wednesday, JUNE 06, 2007
It is indeed heartening to note that considerable allocations have been made towards financing of the Public Sector Development Programme (PSDP) of the Federal government for financial year 2007-08.
Addressing a pre-Budget seminar in Lahore the other day, Advisor to the Prime Minister on Finance, Dr Salman Shah made the total allocations for funding the developmental activities during the next financial year to Rs 724 billion. This included Rs 520 billion for PSDP and another 204 billion, which the public sector corporations would be incurring on their development programmes during the next financial year. It will be in addition to the huge PSDP outlay.
Mega water sector projects including Kalabagh Dam have been allocated Rs 40 billion in the development programme. President/Chief of Army Staff (COAS) General Musharraf has repeatedly stated that five major dams including the much delayed, Kalabagh Dam will be on ground by year 2015, as the country no longer can afford to waste its precious water resources due to absence of the additional water storage facilities.
The Advisor on Finance also gave a happy tiding that funding of the mega water sector projects will be no problem as the donor agencies are quite willing to do so. He said while giving the outlines of the new federal budget that the public-private partnership concept will be further encouraged.
Coming back to PSDP and its allocations, which indicate the good intentions of the government to accelerate the pace of development in all sectors of national economy, the pertinent question which arises in the minds is: how about the utilisation capacity of executing machinery of the Federal government ie ministries, divisions and their attached departments and organisations down the line.
In all fairness, the utilisation capacity of the allocated development funds by the executing machinery leaves much to be desired. The PM’s advisor no doubt gave encouraging figures as regards to the PSDP but what he grossly missed on the occasion was the utilisation of the funds reserved for the PSDP of the outgoing financial year.
The total size for the financial year 2006-07 was placed at Rs 470 billion and additionally organisations/corporations, government managed or private sector managed having more than 51 per cent government share, were expected to spend Rs 145 billion on their development programmes’ implementation.
Such a huge allocation even during outgoing fiscal as compared to Rs 272 billion allocated for PSDP 2005-06 was also quite appreciable and encouraging.
Utilisation of allocated development funds during the outgoing financial year also leaves much to be desired. Though no utilisation figures are available officially but there are reports that hardly about 36 per cent of the Rs 470 billion had been utilised by the executing agencies down the line during first 10 months i.e July 2006 to April 2007 which cannot be termed as appreciable and encouraging at all.
The federal and provincial governments would do well if they make it sure that the executing agencies would timely utilise the development funds. If more than 60 per cent of allocated development funds are reportedly have not been utilised then in actual, little development has taken place. Those responsible for prolonging the utilisation of the PSDP allocated resources should be identified and taken to task quite. The pace of development projects should be accelerated, so that people at large benefit from it at the earliest.
Such lethargic executing agencies’ personnel give way to criticism. Every single penny out of the public exchequer allocated for PSDP should be properly and sincerely utilised, to achieve their purpose. A monitoring system should be devised by the government to check that the allocated funds become a means to an end. Otherwise the government’s development efforts would go down the drain.
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