LAHORE : The Urban Unit aims to develop a policy document proposing Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) to standardise PC-1s for sustainability of government’s projects as part of its task to carry out Third-Party Validation of Chief Minister's District Sustainable Development Goals (CMD-SDGs) project in province.
‘The PC-1s are usually written very casually, with instances of merely copy-pasting, that lead to overlapping or duplication of schemes, thus affecting the desired outcomes of the government’s public welfare projects,’ said Dr Kaiser Bengali, a renowned policy and economy expert serving as Consultant on CMD-SDGs, during an interview with The News.
The Punjab government has brought Dr Bengali on board for consultancy with regards to the validation process, assessing the socio-economic and policy impacts of about 3,475 SDG-related schemes in eight areas of three sectors, including water supply and sanitation; roads and transport; and educational facilities under CMD-SDGs project in the province.
Headed by Planning & Development Board (P&D Department), the CMD-SDGs project will be executed through Local Government & Community Development Department (LG&CDD), Housing Urban Development & Public Health Engineering Department (HUD&PHED) and Communication and Works (C&W) Department. The Urban Unit and SDG Cell – the two departments of P&D Board – will conduct TPV/digital monitoring of the project and align this development plan with the United Nations' SDGs 2030, respectively.
While emphasising the need to improve PC-1s to achieve the desired outcomes, Dr Kaiser Bengali says, ‘If a project is loosely defined to begin with, it really cannot make anyone accountable. Therefore, there’s this pressing need to develop right kind of SOPs to prepare right PC-1s.’
Out of the about 3,500 schemes, Dr Bengali said, we are drawing out 5% sample, comprising over 150 schemes, with a view to identifying the problems in the PC-1 itself. Further, we will select 1% of the size of the project, comprising 30 to 40 schemes, to hold physical review on the ground. ‘We will be talking to the people and also identify whether the schemes, such as roads and schools, are completed or otherwise,’ he added.
Dr Bengali said that the scientific methods of selecting a sample helped to capture all aspects of a project. ‘This sample size, drawn up scientifically, shall reflect the performance of the whole project,’ he said.
He has also proposed to create a legal entity at grassroots level to effectively manage and run a facility; otherwise, it will be very difficult to enforce anything or make people accountable. Therefore, he suggested, the laws need to be made at a village, town or union council level to create a legal body with a view to making it responsible for the affairs of a facility in their area.
Dr Bengali, who has also served as Adviser to the P&D Department, Sindh, informed that the RO plants, in particular, have very high maintenance cost and effort. Membrane has to be changed every month to get the clean drinking water, which sadly remains unchanged for whole year in Sindh. Despite high capital investment, it is unfortunate if it is not serving the purpose beyond one month.
He said that the maintenance of RO plants by women is most effective intervention because women put more value on the quality on water than men. Therefore, he proposed that women should be made part of the legal community.
Similarly, Dr Bengali informed, he has also proposed to include women in our (field) teams because women can go inside the houses to gather complete and correct information. During a survey conducted in Swat sans female field staff, the responses to the questionnaire found out that only men get sick, and women do not, because male staff wouldn’t get access to homes. “Therefore, having women in the team is vital,” he underscored.
Dr Bengali said that we have been investing in development projects mindlessly for the last 75 years without significant social development or economic growth. The governments have spent resources all over the place; whether they built 1-km road somewhere, set up a water supply scheme at a distance from the settlements or without disposal system, built one-room schools, which turned out to be counter-productive. ‘We must build full school campuses with all the facilities for desired results,’ he believed.
He stressed that the feedback of the stakeholders, especially the people, is very important to achieve sustainability of a project or a scheme.
About lack of coordination among various departments involved in the execution of same projects, Dr Kaiser Bengali explains that, first, multiple departments are doing the same job; second, there’s lack of interactions among different departments during execution stage. “We have highlighted these problems and suggested to do away with duplication of work by different departments and hold meetings of XENs of these departments during execution. This needs to be institutionalised,” he added.
Regarding the objective of aligning schemes with SDG goals, Dr Bengali said, the key indicators whether a scheme aligns with the SDGs are determined by the outcomes, which then are compared with baseline survey to see the difference in, say, diarrhea, malaria incidences, learning outcomes of children going to schools, quality of roads, housing, etc. This statistics is called panel data, which allows us to compare over time how the variables are moving.
He said that the desired outcomes aligning with SDG goals will not be achieved overnight. However, in some areas, we can achieve the desired outcomes immediately. “If we provide clean water today, the people and children will stop falling sick a week later. In education, however, the outcome comes a little later. ‘These are achievable goals within a short time, if there is a will to obtain the desired results,’ he added.
The SDGs (2030) are preceded by MDGs (2015). ‘We didn't achieve a single target then. We are again far away from achieving the targets now,’ he said. However, Dr Bengali said, the Punjab government has shown a genuine commitment, in terms of resource allocation for development projects and use of sophisticated technology, to try to achieve the SDG goals. ‘It's a late start, Dr Bengali said, all the goals may not be achieved by the timeline. Yet, if 75% of these goals are achieved that will be a major landmark. I can see this happening in Punjab,’ he added.