ISLAMABAD: Federal Minister for Planning and Development Ahsan Iqbal on Monday directed the authorities concerned to expedite the spending of allocated amount for prompt execution of projects under Public Sector Development Programme (PSDP) before the end of current financial year 2014-15.
Chairing a meeting of secretaries and senior officials of ministries and project executing agencies on public sector development programmes, the minister said, “The government is committed to overcome energy crisis by 2017-18 and ensure conducive and enabling environment to attract foreign direct investment through execution of energy and infrastructure projects”.
He directed National Highway Authority (NHA) to expedite the work on M-8 and N-85 to ensure their timely completion by June 2016 in order to connect Gawadar with Quetta.
The minister said, “The next financial year 2015-16 will include the projects of high impact in the PSDP having closer conformity with economic and development oriented strategy as envisaged in vision 2025”.
Earlier in the day, the minister encouraged new slot of young development fellows YDF in the Planning Commission to come up with innovative ideas and realize them in to tangible outcome through projects of high impact on socio-economic development of the country.
He assured YDF to incorporate the projects of high impact on youth in the next PSDP budget 2015-16.
He showed personal interest in the evaluation of young development fellows and directed them to come up with their short, medium and long term objectives and KPIs in their respective assignments. “The evaluation mechanism of YDF will incentivize the best performance”, he added.
The YDF was also assigned the task of bringing proposals as how Islamabad city could be presented as the model city of the world. In this direction he advised them to make extensive web search to find out best practices and successful innovations in the field of architecture, ICT, social sector etc.
