Provincial development suffers from lack of monitoring

Sindh calls for creation of a permanent secretariat of CCI to ensure provincial complaints are addressed

ISLAMABAD: The entire countryside of Punjab and the total demography of Sindh, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P) and Balochistan crave development and maintenance that proves hard to come by.

Reports from Punjab peripheries are that poverty and lack of development pull back these vast populations back into the pre-agriculture ages. In Sindh, K-P and Balochistan, the situation is even worse.



Not that these regions did not receive allocations for development and maintenance. Over the past ten years all the four provinces received over Rs2 trillion for projects that were approved by the Central Development Working Party of the Planning Commission in Islamabad. Long term development activity could have been generated by this money without much trouble. But that did not happen.

Understanding lack of development

What is the problem with provincial development performance in Pakistan? To figure this out, the central and provincial audit mechanism, the Senate and the National Assembly committees and the entire news media can help.

But this help did not come. Occasionally, media reports indicated that the money allocated to projects did not help make progress and the main reason was corruption.

The Public Accounts Committee (PAC), however, never compiled a report on provincial development spending to determine what percentage of the allocated money was pilfered and how the projects suffered to either become inoperative or dysfunctional before launch.

Over the past 15 years, members of the PAC have been telling me that the committee did not even once call for comprehensive report on projects that were of critical nature and had failed either to reach the operational stage or went dysfunctional in the early phases.

This week we hear that the Sindh government is calling for early convening of the Council of Common Interests (CCI) session. Its argument is that repeated delays in bringing it to session caused drain on development funds that were supposed to be supplemented by the timely release of money from Islamabad. K-P and Balochistan sing the same worry.

Reports from all provinces, however, indicate that ever since the redistribution of the federal pool via CCI there has been no improvement in the project completion and worth-demonstration. That is because there is no clause of performance attached to the release of money to provinces from the federal pool.

Sindh has even demanded creation of a permanent secretariat of the CCI to ensure that timely sessions of the CCI are convened and the provincial complaints are addressed without delay.

Use of CCI

It sounds to be a sane demand and one wonders why there is no central secretariat of the CCI. However, if created, this secretariat would at best meet one side of the demand, and that is timely convening of its session and regular redress in case of complaints about release of money.

This secretariat would still be in want of a mechanism to monitor the proper use of the released money and the functionally, quality of the projects and their maintenance.



Such monitoring demands development experts that should be able to oversee all the four tiers of allocation, spending, contract award and maintenance. Ironically, PEPRA is unable to do that job because its mandate is faulty and bureaucrats of secretary levels head this organ of the state. It is these bureaucrats that are regularly found creating ghost projects for allocation, and for corrupt practices in the award of contracts plus pilfer in the project money.

If Sindh’s demand for a permanent secretariat of the CCI is worth a heed, it should be bound to a monitoring clause that should be operational by creation of a mechanism free of influence from the bureaucratic circles.

It should be manned by experts from the donor organisations, from the Senate, the National Assembly and the provincial assemblies.

This monitoring organ should get the audit conducted fairly, to determine whether the allocation was worth it; the money was spent in accordance with the spending plan; the contract was awarded fairly; and, the project did become operational with maintenance performance.

Surfing though the provincial complaints against the conduct of the CCI over the past 15 years helps to deduce that these complaints were mostly about the failure of Islamabad to timely release the money.

You would not be able to find a single complaint with regard to the unfair award of the contract, pilfer from the project money and dysfunctional nature of the project. That is a tragic situation. Sindh’s demand for a central secretariat is worth attention, but not without a monitoring mechanism.

The writer has worked with major newspapers and specialises in the analysis of public finance and geo-economics of terrorism

 

Published in The Express Tribune, May 1^st, 2017.

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