Centre, provinces differ over sources of funds

[Lahore_Real_Estate]

By Khaleeq Kiani
Thursday, 19 Aug, 2010
ISLAMABAD: Honing a four-stage recovery programme, the multilateral lending agencies and federal and provincial governments agreed on Wednesday to complete before Oct 15 the damage and need assessment (DNA) of the devastation caused by unprecedented floods.

The federal and provincial governments, however, differed over sources of funding and over their immediate priorities because Sindh wanted enhanced supplies of medicines to avert the second stage of humanitarian crisis and Punjab desired an early action on rehabilitation.

This was the outcome of the first meeting of the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank with federal and provincial authorities on Tuesday. The country heads of the two lending agencies, federal secretaries, provincial chief secretaries and chairman of the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) attended the meeting.

Informed sources told Dawn that the participants agreed that recovery programme would be prioritized in the order of rescue, early relief, rehabilitation and reconstruction.



The provincial governments were asked to provide sectoral authenticated data of losses, including that of human lives and damage to livestock infrastructure and energy sector.

At the very outset, representatives of the Punjab government wanted to know how funding for the development of infrastructure damaged by floods would be raised and what should be the source of these funding.



General Nadeem, the chairman of NDMA, said the top priority at the moment was on rescue and early relief and issues like funding and its sources could only be taken up when damage assessment was ready.

The representative from Sindh said that being at the tail-end the provincial government was still in the rescue and relief phase and the critical requirement at this stage was provision of medicines. A failure on this score would lead to a big human tragedy, he warned.

Gen Nadeem informed the meeting that contribution from the international community for humanitarian assistance had now picked up and reached $466 million until Wednesday. This would help speed up the supply of medicines and other essential items.

The World Bank and the Asian Development Bank handed over to provinces the sector-wise plans for damage and need assessment and suggested that every provincial government should appoint ‘dedicated focal people’ to coordinate and pass on data collected by provincial agencies to lending agencies.

The World Bank experts were of the view that provincial governments were better placed to assess the loss of human lives, energy, infrastructure, crops and livestock, but the only requirement from the lending agencies would be that the provincial reports should be authenticated by relevant agencies so that these could be verified without any hindrance or doubt over the process.

The sources said the lending agencies told the participants that once the DNA was available within two months, the process for sources of funding, its collection, distribution and implementation would be worked out.