US $875,000 technical assistance grant for Balochistan

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has approved a US $875,000 technical assistance (TA) grant to the Pakistani government for the preparation of the Balochistan Resource Management Programme, according to an ADB official. "We're helping the government to streamline operations at both the federal and provincial levels," Marshuk Ali Shah, the ADB country director, told IRIN in the capital, Islamabad. "There are so many responsibilities that now fit into the provincial government's range of operations. For example: health facilities and issues, education, the uplift of rural roads - all are now the responsibilities of various departments at the provincial and even local government level," he explained, adding that the TA was aimed at strengthening such endeavours within the existing framework of governance. The assistance grant would be financed by the ADB with $450,000 as part of its funding programme, and the government of The Netherlands, which would provide $250,000, while the Pakistani government would put up the remaining $175,000 as an in-kind contribution, an ADB press statement said. It also said that, as part of a strategy to help implement governance and macroeconomic reforms, the bank had agreed to help the provincial governments prepare and implement province-focused public-sector reforms. The grant would be a medium-term arrangement, focusing on bolstering public-service management in Balochistan, Shah said. "This looks at a time-frame of five to seven years. That's how long we estimate it'll be before such projects start to show results," he added. "We're doing that in all the provinces now. This grant is one of several projects the ADB is currently running in Balochistan. One of our separate, parallel operations, for example, focuses on the uplift of rural roads and is budgeted at $187 million," he said. He noted that the ADB was supporting 15 social development projects in the province, which covers 44 percent of Pakistan's total area, but comprises only 5 percent of the country's overall population. One of the major projects is a rural development project which deals with water conservation and storage - a key issue in arid Balochistan, where only one-third of its total land area is productive grazing or agricultural land. Also, the provincial government's capacity to handle development issues is limited by severe resource constraints: in the fiscal year 2003, for example, Balochistan generated barely 7 percent of revenue receipts and relied heavily on revenue transfers from a federal divisible pool, as well as direct transfers from the federal government, as compared to other provinces.