PRSP: Ambitious or realistic?
The preparation of PRSP was started in January this year and the draft was placed to different donor agencies for observation. On the basis of the recommendations of the donors, the document was revised in July. Apart from social and economic issues, the donors raised some political issues in their observations and recommended a number of reforms, particularly regarding election system of the country, in order to ensure free and fair elections which is a pre-condition for good governance.
The recommendations included the creation of a regulatory framework for the election commission to empower it with full legal and regulatory authority, required for independent and impartial monitoring of elections. In their recommendations, the donors reiterated that there should be a transparent and flawless voter list, transparency in appointment of chief election commissioner and preparation of budget.
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel. The strategy paper titled "Unlocking the Potential: National Strategy for Accelerated Poverty Reduction" is, no doubt, a very important document and its main objective is to expedite the process of poverty alleviation and reduce poverty by half by 2015. The PRSP has been formulated on the basis of the objective of UN Millennium Development Goal(MDG) of eradicating poverty from the world by 2015.
Virtually, the document is a systematic plan highlighting the targets to ensure social development and stability, economic growth and progress and different steps towards removing poverty. The document identified eight major priority areas namely, employment, nutrition, quality education, indigenous good governance, maternal health, sanitation, checking crime and monitoring.
In fulfilling the UN Millennium Goals , the PRSP document has made projection about some monetary requirements for implementing sector wise programmes: An amount of $12.12 billion for primary education, $1 billion for nutrition programme for school lunches and 0.5 billion for sanitation programme during ten years from 2005 to 2015.
But the preparation and approval of the document is not enough. It is the proper implementation of the programme on which the success depends. In Bangladesh, the history of implementation of development projects is not very encouraging rather it has a long tradition of not being able to fully utilise the project fund and resources without achieving both physical and financial targets.
In this perspective, there remains a great amount of uncertainty in implementing the PRSP because PRSP seems to be a very ambitious plan and the success of its implementation entirely depends on donors' assistance. Though the exact amount has not yet been calculated, but it is almost certain that the PRSP cannot be implemented by internal resources alone.
According to the target of UN Millennium Development Goal, the PRSP will be implemented for 10 years up to 2015 and within this time the poverty has to be reduced by 3 percent per year. This is an uphill task in the context of present situation of Bangladesh .
As per the provision of the PRSP, 14 percent resources of the GDP will be needed for the implementation of the programmes -- 10 percent of which will be mobilized internally -- while the remaining 4 percent will come from external sources. The paper has not specifically mentioned anything about the sources to meet the cost of implementation of PRSP. It did not make any projection about how the government wants to go about it.
It should be kept in mind that the PRSP is a three-year strategy for development programme and it has been launched 18 months later and the government has only one year time of its tenure to work for its implementation. This will be a very challenging job for the government to fulfil the target of reducing the poverty by 3 percent per year as envisaged in the plan document.
Since the government will not be able to finance PRSP out of its own resources, the dependency on the donors will increase more and more and in that case the relationship with the donors needs to be intimate and closer. On different issues -- good governance, corruption, terrorism and law and order situation, rise of militancy, free and fair election -- and for similar other reasons, donors are always showing their cold attitudes and the relationship with donors is worsening day by day. Instead of providing financial assistance, they are more willing to put pressure on accepting their conditions and demands.
The donors are also preparing their joint country assistance strategy to finance development projects and as such have not yet released $ 200 billion loan under the world bank's development support credit phase-III of the current ADP. It is known that the donors have tagged two pre-conditions such as endorsement of the strategy paper and enactment of procurement act for the release of fund.
Since, at present there is the problem of implementing ADP because of non-availability of fund from the donors, it is easily understandable what will be the fate of an ambitious plan like PRSP. In the PRSP, there are provisions for establishing good governance, complete separation of judiciary from administration, resistance against corruption, establishment of a Human Rights Commission and the assistance is entirely dependant on the fulfilment of these pledges. The government is supposed to place the paper before the donor agencies very shortly for comments and the donors may raise issues regarding good governance, corruption and terrorism and may suspend release of fund till the conditions are met fully.
The past record of Bangladesh in respect of implementation of development programs are not at all satisfactory. It is very difficult to find any project which has been completed within the project period and both the financial and physical targets have been achieved. The overall utilisation of ADP is only 45 percent and a huge shortfall in physical targets as well. With this background of programme implementation, how can it be possible for the government to implement PRSP, having the target of achieving MDG, and fulfil the planned objective of poverty alleviation?
If the present trend of widespread corruption and administrative inefficiency persists, there is little hope for any success in the implementation of PRSP. Unless the present administrative machinery is totally overhauled, relieved of political and partisan pressure, corruption is curbed down to a reasonable extent and a viable and long term reform agenda is developed through political will and commitment, the goals of PRSP will not be achieved and the country will not be able to get rid of vicious circle of poverty.