Farkhund Yousafzai
ISLAMABAD: Ministry of Planning and Development has set guidelines for the Public Sector Development Projects (PSDP) 2023-24, with the advice to the relevant authorities that due to constrained resources, a rational approach should be adopted to attract the private sector and achieve the long-term development goals.
The PSDP 2023-24 formulation process and its projections for 2024-25 and 2025-26 have been started to give an extra amount of time to the sponsoring and executing Ministries, Divisions, and Agencies to deliberate and prepare their respective development portfolios with due diligence.
Planning Commission has issued some guidelines in this regard.
It said that all federal ministries, divisions, and provincial governments should intensively scrutinize the approved portfolio to ensure whether the proposed projects fall under overall development goals set under National Development Framework and the governmental policy.
The proposed program of the ministries and divisions must have a basic logic of intervention for achieving the high-standard sectoral goals by optimizing limited PSDP resources to produce maximum outputs, which contribute to the high-level development goals and SDGs.
Ministry issues guidelines
Ministries and divisions should also focus on key projects with tangible deliverables that may be started on a priority basis with adequate funding for early completion during the coming year.
Moreover, the Planning Commission suggested that no new project which has not been approved before would be made part of the development budget, as per Public Finance Management Act 2019,
It said that the recent floods and heavy monsoon rains have adversely affected the people across the country. Therefore, projects for the rehabilitation of flood-hit areas and the development of socio-economic conditions of the affected may be given priority.
