Call for transparency in accountability process

LAHORE
Institute of Social and Policy Sciences on Tuesday launched its latest report “Education Sector Procurements in Punjab: A Horizontal Accountability Perspective”, which stresses the need of transparency in the process and accountability mechanism for better utilisation of public money.
The launching ceremony was presided over by Punjab Assembly Standing Committee on Education’s Chairman Engineer Qamar-ul-Islam Raja while parliamentarians and representatives of different political parties and members of civil society were present.
In his presentation Senior Research Fellow at I-SAPS shared key findings of the study on procurements of school civil works, textbooks and purchases through the School Councils (SCs) and highlighted issues related to transparency and especially the capacity of the SCs.
Ahmad Ali said over Rs 6 billion were allocated for civil works at public schools across Punjab, Rs 3.4 billion for textbooks and Rs 5 billion for SCs purchases in the 2013-14 budgetary allocations.
According to him, some of the issues pertaining to procurements of schools construction are informal coalitions, monitoring mechanisms and lack of oversight and internal checks while issues in the textbooks procurement are not sharing information and unavailability of data and lack of oversight mechanisms. I-SAPS’ research fellow also said understanding of the procurement process, non-formation of procurement committees and non-filing and not maintaining the quotations were main issues being faced in purchases through the Schools Councils. Engineer Qamar-ul-Islam Raja regretted that people did not participate in education debate. “In such a scenario, it would not help even if we put such data on the website”, he said while saying public pressure on the government was lacking vis-à-vis education initiatives.
Earlier, some elected representatives including Saadia Sohail Rana expressed concerns over “powerless” Standing Committees and urged strengthening of the same through amendments in the Punjab Assembly’s Rules of Procedure.