PESHAWAR, Feb 1: A big question mark hangs over the future of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government’s ‘output-based budget’ making process due to reasons that are beyond its ability to control, according to official circles.

The fate of the new initiative is doomed because the government departments need a sea change in their functioning and higher degree of efficiency, officials involved in its implementation told Dawn .

“The results will be clear in next two to three years,” said an official closely associated with the introduction of output-based budgeting in the government departments.

Aiming to encourage greater output and improve service delivery in its departments, the government introduced the OBB last year in four of its departments with plans to expand its scope to over half a dozen other departments from the next financial year, according to sources.

However, the skeptics said that the government needed to launch a massive training programme to upgrade its employees’ budget-making skills and prepare them for future obligations.

“The new concept is being introduced in government departments through a series of seminars, but the effort seems to be too little to help the government achieve its objectives,” said an official.

Knowledgeable circles said that the OBB was preceded by a similar initiative called performance-based budge (PBB), introduced by the last provincial government in 2005-06 on pilot basis in Peshawar and Kohat districts.

Introduced in the education, health and agriculture, the project funded by the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID), was limited to 201 service delivery units (SDUs).

Later, PBB’s scope was extended to 970 pilot SDUs in 10 districts after achieving encouraging results in many of the initially-selected 201 SDUs that included primary, middle and high schools, basic health units, civil dispensaries, maternal and child health centres, agriculture extension circles, livestock circles and family welfare centres.

The selected SDUs, said a source, were provided 100 per cent funds in line with their requirements other than their salary budget needs.

“In case of schools, one of the PBB’s objectives was to improve enrolment for which the selected schools were provided funds not only for paying teachers’ salaries, but they were also paid to buy blackboards, furniture etc demanded by the schools,” said the source.

Sources said that the government shifted from PBB (a more capital intensive and time consuming effort) to OBB, which was more of a macro level performance enhancing initiative.

“The OBB’s success would always remain at risk for a province (like Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) that contributes only 6 to 7 per cent of its total annual revenue receipts with heavy chunks of money coming from a highly unpredictable federal divisible pool and unreliable payments from revenue sources like net hydel profit,” said a finance manager of the provincial government.

Other than an insufficient financial base, the government also lacked an effective monitoring and evaluation mechanism to achieve the OBB’s objectives, said a source. A full-time monitoring mechanism, said the source, was needed to check the departments’ progress on targets.

“The finance department does not have the financial resources and human capital to monitor the departments’ performance,” said an official.

The official said that under the OBB the finance department had distributed a set of documents and proformas among the departments with timelines for preparing and submitting preliminary and revised budgetary estimates.

“We don’t have a culture of following timelines,” said an official, adding “how could you make the communication and works department to complete infrastructure schemes on time?”

Similarly, the OBB, said a senior official, could not be implemented across the board, undermining its effectiveness. “How could it be implemented in the government entities that don’t provide services or entities like the Establishment Department, Chief Minister’s House, Governor’s House, Home Department etc,” said the official.

The officials said that the OBB was likely to fade away with the completion of the project.