Wednesday, May 1, 2019

Have high ambition, PM tells the planners


Kathmandu, Apr. 28
Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli on Sunday urged the planners and bureaucracy to change the mind set to have high ambition in development.

“Our mind set is our speed breaker. We hesitate to have high development and growth ambitions just thinking that what would others say. We must aim high,” he said while speaking at the full meeting of the National Planning Commission (NPC) at the Singhadurbar.
PM is also the chairman of the NPC.

Stating that the double digit growth could be higher than 10 per cent, but most of planners just take it as the target, PM Oli urged them to think and plan beyond the limit.

According to him, though it seems challenging to meet the target of double-digit growth rate, the country will have in the next couple of years.

“When we continuously achieve the growth rate of about 7 per cent at the time when we are in political transition and working to create legal foundation for the new political structure of the country, we can make an impressive achievement in the next years,” he said.

He criticised the draft of the 15th Periodic Plan (2019/20-2024/25) for lacking some highly ambitious projects.

PM Oli said that the increasing land price had made the development projects dearer and the government was facing problem in implementing large infrastructure projects as huge amount of money was needed for the land acquisition.

The government had adopted the national motion of ‘Prosperous Nepal: Happy Nepali’, but it seems that only those are happy who have money, therefore, the government will work to bring happiness to them who actually need it, he maintained.

The NPC meeting passed the draft of the 15th Periodic Plan which will be presented to the Cabinet on Monday.

Vice-Chairman of the NPC Prof. Dr. Pushpa Raj Kandel said that the new plan had tried to address the need of the people at every corner of the country.

Meanwhile, PM Oli launched the National Data Profile prepared by the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS), a statistical agency under the NPC.

The National Data Profile is an integrated open data platform that collets and presents the national, provincial and local data. The data has been segregated at the ward level as well.

The portal www.nationaldata.gov.np can have geographical and theme gateway which gives the users a unique experience in accessing and handling the data.

“It will benefit all the government and other development agencies as well as the planners in planning and executing development programmes across the country. The government will have basic information so that it can mobilise the grant money on the headcount basis,” said CBS Director General Suman Raj Aryal.

The government in its Policy and Programmes for the current Fiscal Year 2018/19 had said that the development of the country now onwards would be based on intensive analysis, research and evidence based on data, and a national statistical base would be created for the same.

The federal, provincial and local governments can feed the data related to them in the portal.
Aryal said that the capacity-building programmes for the subnational governments for the use of data portal would be organised within a couple of weeks.

“This is a great achievement as it will not only increase the access to crucial data but also support logical programme execution,” he said.

Published in The Rising Nepal daily on 29 April 2019. 

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