President's Investment Initiative

The government has finally come to the realisation that despite its pro-business policies the pace of investments is unsatisfactory and administrative hurdles are mostly to blame for the situation.
President General Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz co-chaired a meeting in Islamabad on Monday, and decided to launch the 'President's Investment Initiative' aimed at simplifying the procedures and formalities for investors.
The initiative has an ambitious target: to enhance foreign investments from $1 billion in 2004 all the way up to $27 billion in the next five years. Things being what they are that might look like an overly optimistic goal, but it is also indicative of the government's resolve to create an investor-friendly climate, especially in the mega projects sector.
In fact, the meeting noted with concern that a number of mega projects failed to materialise as per the feasibility reports' projections even though the investors have been running from one office to another to complete the formalities.
The President's initiative, therefore, seeks to simplify the formalities and procedures for the setting up of new projects, and also to ease things in other areas that act as 'speed breakers' such as the process of getting the requisite facilities from different departments, and approval of gas, electricity and water connections. Most of the procedural formalities can be overcome through the introduction of single-window operations.
A prospective entrepreneur needing official permission to set up an industry in a certain area should not have to seek separate approvals, as is the case as present, from different provincial government departments as well as the district administration, but from one single source within a specified time period.
Similarly, after such an approval is in order, the gas, electricity and water connections, should be made available within a fixed time limit. This would minimise investors' interface with government officials, and thereby substantially reduce chances of corrupt officials harassing prospective entrepreneurs to make illegal money and also curtail the infamous bureaucratic red tape.
Terming land acquisition as one of the major hurdlers in the setting up of new projects in the country, the meeting decided to direct provincial governments to come up with a solution to the problem, and ensure transfer of land to investors for new projects within the shortest possible period. Which should be helpful.
An even more serious issue, however, is the rampant fraud in land sales. Well-connected land mafia has been resorting to illegal land grabs, to sell and resell their acquisitions under fake land titles.
Even though successive governments have been talking about the need to eliminate this mafia, not much has been done on the ground. A while back, the present government had announced a plan to computerise the land record system in order to check the menace of fake titles.
The project is still to show progress. It is not, of course, going to be an easy task since the old land record system relies mainly on imprecise measurements, based in large part on the patwaris' age-old practice of counting paces, while the computerised documents have to be perfectly precise. Yet a way has to be found to computerise the record system so as to make it easily verifiable.
In addition to addressing these problems of bureaucratic inefficiency, corruption, as well as infrastructure deficiencies, the government needs to take necessary steps towards expeditious resolution of disputes concerning contractual obligations.
The existing system is notoriously slow moving, and hence a big source of frustration for investors who may have to deal with a breach of contract. Now that both the President and the Prime Minister have decided to hold monthly review meetings to remove all hurdles that act as a disincentive for foreign investors, it is hoped that these problems will not take long to be resolved.