The government has restructured the Planning Commission with induction of a tier of advisors to ensure sound strategies for key sectors to bring the country out of prevailing economic crisis, it was learnt.
Sources told Business Recorder on Thursday that the new government has re-organised the Planning Commission with induction of a tier of advisors, best in their respective fields, to evaluate each and every project submitted by the ministries for funding. The team of advisors included, Dr Ishrat Hussain, Dr Ishfaq, Shoaib Sultan, Shamsul Mulk and Dr Khadija Haq are working for Planning Commission without any salary and other perks.
The Planning Commission has also hired four consultants against special pay package and assigned them the job of preparing the strategies for key sectors of the economy. The Planning Commission's role in policy formulation is of extra ordinary nature and it definitely requires the services of the best available stuff of the professionals to deliver the good.
Some members of the commission hired by the pervious government have been replaced with the new ones, as the coalition government wants new policy making strategies including a workable solution to energy and food crises. The government also believes the whole focus, in the past few years, was on approval of projects without even considering their importance to the national economy.
This trend was required to be reverted and so is the role of the commission. The role of the Planning Commission in the new global economy driven by the market forces should have been to evaluate every project to make it value added.
With this vision, sources said the PC was re-organised to achieve sound economic decisions taking into consideration prevailing as well as future economic requirements to steer the country out of existing crisis. Unfortunately, they said, the country was facing problem because the decisions taken in the past were not in line with the requirements of the policy-making. Thus there was no planning for the future and the country landed into worst crisis.
They said that the PC was currently focusing on a two-year short-term plan, 2008-10, to address the issues on economic front with agriculture and energy top priority. The two-year plan is being designed not only to meet the next two years requirements but also could be easily fit with the next five year Medium Term Development Plan from 2010-15.