THE Federal Cabinet, which met in Islamabad on Tuesday with Prime Minister Imran Khan in the chair, disposed of heavy agenda including discussion on institutional reforms, economic situation, import of three hundred thousand metric tons of sugar to offset its shortage in the domestic market, import of wheat, cleared some important appointments and approved drafts of some pieces of legislation to be presented in Parliament. The meeting was informed that the economy has started recovering from the shock of Covid-19 and that over 71,000 posts in the federal government that were vacant for over one year stand abolished.
There is no doubt that reforms were direly needed to improve working of the government, eliminate redundancies, take care of overlapping of functions and streamline manpower. This required deeper insight into working and output of various ministries, divisions and departments to determine their utility and viability and make recommendations accordingly. Institutional Reforms and reforms in civil service, supervised by Advisor to the Prime Minister Dr Ishrat Hussain have now started shaping up and the cabinet was informed that after the restructuring process, the number of federal government departments had been brought down to 324 from 441. But fuller impact of the entire process would be known when ministries, divisions and departments start operating under their new framework and there is a clear criterion for judging performance of the individuals and output of institutions. It is all the more important to see what happens to crucial reforms in institutions like Federal Board of Revenue (FBR), State Bank of Pakistan, PIA, Pakistan Railways and above all Police especially in the backdrop of reports that the proposed reforms in FBR have been rejected by its officers and staff. It seems real stakeholders were not taken on-board while analyzing working of different institutions and recommendations too have been made, in some cases, unilaterally. This is also evident from the authoritarian decision of abolishing of thousands of vacant posts without going into rationality of their creation and continuation. There are also loopholes in the new system of promotion and retirement, which are prone to misuse on the basis of liking and disliking. There is, therefore, logic in the demand that all recommendations for reforms be made public and debated at the forum of Parliament to remove lacunae and build consensus on them.