ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Imran Khan signed agreements with the federal ministers on Wednesday to improve the performance of ministries and governance system during the next two years.
Speaking on the occasion, the prime minister urged the cabinet members to exceed the targets set in the agreements in order to live up to the expectations of the masses and make the political party stronger through performance delivery.
“We are ensuring that during our tenure, all the promises are met and all services delivered to the citizens,” he said. “If we managed to achieve the targets of this year, we will easily achieve the targets of the next year,” he said.
The signing was part of the prime minister’s comprehensive Civil Service Reforms Agenda, under which the government had initiated a management system that brought the entire federal government together through a single implementation tool of ‘Performance Agreements’.
PM Imran Khan said the government have come out of difficult times and it is now time to gear up efforts to achieve the benchmarks set for the next two years. He said it is only through performance the elections will be won by us.
The prime minister said the high-performance delivery in the next two years would make a smooth way ahead for the government to succeed in general polls. “I want our party to achieve a standard where an MNA wins, not on the basis of disbursement of development funds, but on the performance of the government,” he said.
PM Imran Khan asked the heads of ministries to achieve the performance goals by setting high aspirations and evaluation of their own highs and lows.
Regarding electronic voting machines, the Prime Minister said only those who are benefiting from the corrupt system are opposing their use in the elections. He said we want to introduce this system in order to do away with the issue of rigging.
He mentioned as the “biggest challenge” the persistent fight with a number of mafias that wanted a status quo for their vested interests. “Now the mafia has started opposing the use of EVMs (Electronic Voting Machines) in the next general election because it had been the beneficiary of the existing system through corruption,” he said.
He pointed out that after 1970, every election was regarded as controversial but still no one wanted to rectify the problem.
Performance Agreements
Special Assistant to PM on Establishment Shehzad Arbab said a total of 41 ministries had prepared 1,100 initiatives for the next two years. Of these, 426 initiatives will be completed by June 2022 and 488 by June 2023 while 176 running initiatives will supplement the overall delivery of ministries for the next two years and beyond.
He said the Performance Agreements had been finalized after a rigorous process of review and evaluation. He said the exercise not only allowed the government to implement its agenda more effectively but also helped the ministers and secretaries to track progress within their divisions and objectively assess performance of their officers.
Under the Performance Agreements, all ministries have prepared work plans with a set of initiatives and quarterly targets to be achieved over the next two years.
These work plans have been reviewed by the Peer Review Committee (comprising senior officials of cross-sectoral ministries) for improvement, besides the feedback incorporated by the ministries before submission to the PM Office.
The process of quarterly performance review will enable the prime minister to keep track of his government performance. This system will not only help all ministries set their annual work plans but also create space to embed the reform agenda into the government’s system.
The targets collectively reviewed quarterly through a digitized platform, will play a key role in identifying bottlenecks and addressing cross-ministerial coordination challenges.
A total of 41 ministries have prepared 1,090 initiatives for the next two years. These are related to various sectors including development projects, economy, policy making and reforms. These agreements cover all Divisions of the Federal Government.
