Zubair Qureshi
Islamabad
Pakistan Institute of development Economics(PIDE)-a research think tank of Planning commission-on Thursday organized a one-day conference titled “Doing Development Better: Analyzing the PSDP” and a launching ceremony of the book “Doing Development Better” written by VC PIDE Dr. Nadeemul Haq.
The ceremony took place at the auditorium of Planning Commission and attended by a large number of senior officials, donor representatives, think tanks, media and academia.
Deputy Chairman Planning Commission Muhammad Jehanzeb Khan inaugurated the conference. The first panel discussion on Reviewing the PDP was chaired by Sartaj Aziz.
The panelists discussed problems faced by current public investment management system and termed were of structural nature and could be overcome.
The presenters of the session urged to use the examples from South Korea and Malaysia the way they did it. They started with exporting primary goods but focus was on producing secondary goods.
The second panel discussion was led by Country Director World Bank Illango Patchamuthu.
The panelists of this session identified that even the laid down procedure formulating the projects was not followed. The failure to do so is due to the procedural bottlenecks and capacity issues. PC-IV and PC-V are missing from the system thus effective monitoring or improvement in the system on dynamic basis is not happening.
There are overlaps in projects objectives and jurisdictions and the use of technology in the project development and later in its implementation and monitoring & evaluation were redundant.
Planning commission approved about 10 years ago a complete road map on digitization of PSDP was approved but never implemented.
