Pildat report raises more question marks over governance in Sindh

Karachi
Sindh and Balochistan stand exactly at par with each other in terms of governance and behind Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab.
On the scorecard of comparative governance, Punjab leads with a score of 42 percent, followed by Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa with 37 percent.
However, both Balochistan and Sindh, one province with a local government and the other without, stand at third place with a 34 percent governance score.
The “Comparative Scorecard on Governance in Four Provinces” was released by the Pakistan Institute of Legislative Development and Transparency (Pildat) on Monday.
The analysis compares and scores all four constituent provinces of the country with regards to their service delivery in the year after the 2013 general election.
According to the scorecard, Sindh ranked first in only three of the 24 parameters of governance which were use of technology with a score of 46 percent, energy production and management with a score of 44 percent and annual development programmes which scored 40 percent.
The category in which the provincial government scored the lowest was transparency and devolution of power to lower tiers, where it scored only 21 percent.
Meanwhile, Balochistan outranked other provinces in five out of the 24 parameters. With the only functioning local government in the country, it scored the highest, 60 percent, in the category of devolution of power to lower tiers. Its lowest score was in anti-corruption efforts with 21 percent, where it ranked fourth, after all the other provinces.
On the other hand, the leading province in governance, Punjab, scored the highest in 15 parameters out of the 24 parameters. It also led in maximum tax collection with a score of 76 percent.
Punjab’s worst performance, with a score of 21 percent, was in management of unemployment where it stood behind all other provinces.
Even though KPK ranked first only in two categories — management of unemployment with 38 percent and poverty alleviation with 36 percent — its good scores in tax collection, 64 percent, and transparency, 50 percent, put it ahead of Balochistan and Sindh.
Both Punjab and KPK passed right to information laws, while Sindh and Balochistan still remain without them.
However, it performed the worst in being able to supply drinking water, with a score of 25 percent.
The chief of Pildat, Ahmed Bilal Mehboob, said while talking to The News that the analysis was conducted with an aim to objectively highlight areas of strengths and weaknesses to improve the quality of governance.
He said, so far, all the discourse pertaining to governance had been about enforcing democracy. “But now that it is in place, we need to gauge how effective it is and find out the areas where it lacks,” he said, “There was a need to compare the service delivery of all the four provincial governments without the subjectivity of political players.”
Explaining the concept of the scorecard, he said the analysis seeks to comprehend the ‘extent of good governance’ in the country and see the areas where milestones have been achieved along with those in which performance lags behind.
For the research, he said, 90 percent of the data came from the respective provincial governments, while the gaps were filled with the help of credible studies by international organisations.

Going forward
The scorecard also highlights five areas in which all the provinces are progressing and lagging behind. In the first year of governance since the 2013, all the provincial governments invested heavily in energy production, water resource management and foreign investment.
Tax collection improved across the board and a number of initiatives were also witnessed in utilisation of technology for better governance. The initiatives include computerisation of land records, online tax calculators, tenders for public procurement, customer feedback and helpline and online FIR registration.
The analysis also hailed the move of the KPK and Punjab governments to enact right to information laws, not yet passed in Sindh and Balochistan.
Meanwhile, the areas in which all the provinces performed poorly were the timely response to natural disasters and absorption of people into the workforce.
Polio cases were reported from all across the country and its presence was also detected in water samples.
Ahmad Ali, lead researcher at the Institute of Social and Policy Sciences, welcomed the initiative of holding the government accountable for its performance by the people and the civil society. However, he stressed, it was important to keep the feedback loop working so the shortcomings pointed out in the analysis also reach policymakers and can help towards correcting the course of development.