Islamabad: - In order to discourage the late submission of projects and incomplete PC-I, the Ministry of Planning has issued a calendar of the Central Development Working Party (CDWP) meetings for the entire financial year 2016-17.
According to the calendar, the copies of which have been distributed among the concerned ministries and departments, there will be around 23 meetings of CDWP from July 2016 to June 2017.
According to the calendar available with The Nation, there will be two CDWP meetings each month; July 2016 is the only exception, in which one meeting is to be held.
“The step was taken by the ministry to discourage last time entry of the projects, submission of incomplete working papers and to provide proper time for evaluation of the projects,” an official said.
“Usually the late projects are submitted with incomplete PC-1 or even with no PC-I at all,” the official said, and added, ”Some time we even don’t get the PC-I in advance, and the working papers are submitted just a night before the CDWP meeting.”
“Resultantly, the official said, the technical section does not have enough time to appraise the projects.”
He said the new calendar would also benefit the ministries, departments and divisions as most of the times there was uncertainty about the schedule of CDWP meetings, and therefore the officials had to enquire again and again to verify the date.
“Now after the issuance of the calendar, sponsors of the projects are even aware of the meeting dates, scheduled for next June,” the official said, adding, “that they could plan accordingly to prepare their PC-I in advance.”
“Technical sections of the planning ministry will have ample time to scrutinize the project prior to the CDWP meeting,” the official added.
“If implemented this is a good initiative because it will help discourage the last time entry of the politically motivated projects,” the official said, but quickly added, “It does not seem possible in the current set up. Just take the example of PSDP 2016-17. Initially it was claimed that only three percent allocations had been made for new projects, and unapproved projects would be out of it. But what happened in the end? Due to political pressures, out of total 992 schemes, the planning ministry added around 199 new schemes, 172 of which were unapproved which completely repudiate the ministry claims,” the official concluded.