The Planning Commission is all set to take-up Poverty Reduction Strategy Programme (PRSP-II) with provinces for next five years on Friday. Sources in Punjab government revealed that the government was due to submit its PRSP about a year earlier but it delayed due to unavoidable circumstances, particularly on political front.
An interim PRSP paper was therefore, being pursued by the government since last one year. However, to meet the condition of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the federal government is bound to submit its PRSP-II with a mission statement to cut poverty by half in Pakistan by 2015.
In order to make the full PRSP a truly participatory anti-poverty strategy, that is reflective of the diversity of all the federating units, it will be based on the provincial PRSPs prepared by the provincial governments themselves in consultations with the newly elected district governments. The provincial PRSPs would include detailed costing of the programmes and projects that these governments intend to undertake over the medium-term.
The provincial PRSPs would be based on the medium-term framework of each province that would develop a holistic picture of provincial requirements and resource availability. This will identify the additional resources required to support the PRSP programme and meet its objectives/targets. The provincial governments have been assured of the federal government's assistance in preparing the provincial PRSPs.
The PRSP is an immensely important policy document that is being prepared by the government by outlining Pakistan's economic policy regime over the next few years. It is on the basis of the PRSP that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) will extend major concessional funding under the Poverty Reduction Growth Facility (PRGF).
Other institutions including the World Bank and Asian Development Bank (ADB) have also conditioned their funding on the PRSP, as have bilateral donors. It may be noted that the Interim-PRSP (I-PRSP) was made public by the Ministries of Finance and Planning in November 2001.
According the circles critical to any such move, the I-PRSP document itself suggests that extensive public consultation took place in the preparation stages; there is no concrete evidence to confirm this claim. These circles further added that vast majority of civil society groups are still only discovering that the PRSP process exists.
These circles have disputed the effectiveness of imposed privatisation, liberalisation, removal of price supports, and regressive indirect taxation, and pointed out that these are not legitimate and rational policies to strengthen Pakistan's economy and reduce poverty.