Government intends to revive and reorganise EDB

Adviser on commerce working to make it a robust capacity building institution

LAHORE: The government of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) has decided to revive the Engineering Development Board (EDB) by reversing the decision of the previous government which had closed the prime engineering board of the country.

A team led by Adviser to Prime Minister on Commerce, Textile, Industries and Investment Abdul Razak Dawood is aggressively doing its homework for fully reviving and reorganising the EDB to make it a vibrant entity for capacity building of the industrial sector.



The government wants to revive the EDB after consultation with stakeholders. The board was disbanded by the previous government as its unwarranted regulatory role made it an inefficient entity.

“The PTI government wants to include in the EDB engineering focus areas with a view to introducing latest technologies,” said an official of the board.

The scope of activities will be widened to include civil engineering and infrastructure projects as well. The reorganised entity will be a public-private partnership where the most competent engineers, professors and entrepreneurs will be nominated, he informed.

The EDB had made an operational plan by creating four groups ie tariff group, policy development group, sector development group and business development group with the aim of focusing on tariff rationalisation, indigenisation, deletion monitoring and vendor development.

However, it failed to guide the industry in cutting down the cost of doing business, encourage competition, support the local industry and create an enabling tariff environment for the export of engineering goods.

The role of EDB over the years has overshadowed its prime function of capacity building and connecting local companies with the rest of the world and unfortunately had developed like a regulator.

The adviser’s team is working in this regard and consulting key industry representatives.



“There are huge expectations about initiating a process to put the industrial sector on the right track of technology upgrade; integration with the world market is also another challenge that needs to be given due emphasis,” the official added.

The EDB was established in 1995 and continued to work as an apex government body until the PML-N government decided to dissolve it and gave one year to complete the dissolution process.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 7^th, 2018.

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