KARACHI: The Sindh government has indicated that the size of the Annual Development Plan (ADP) for 2014-15 will remain unchanged at the current year’s level of Rs120 billion due to paucity of funds.

According to guidelines issued by the government, the new ADP would have 20 per cent new schemes and focus will be on completion of 80pc ongoing schemes.

The Sindh government has warned administrative departments to refrain from submitting ambitious demands as resource constraints would not be allowing increase in allocations.

Sources in the Sindh government revealed that there was no chance of completing ongoing schemes during the current plan as the finance department released only 25-50pc funds for development in each ADP for the last two years.

Sources further said that a number of new schemes submitted by various departments remained unapproved due to inaction of the technical committee which met only twice this year.

Sources said that a department had 40 schemes in the current year. Of these, 28 schemes were the on-going schemes while only 12 were new.

The directive issued by the Planning and Development said that on-going schemes reaching fairly advanced level of implementation should be adequately funded so that these are completed during the current year plan and phased out from the ADP.

Any new scheme included in the ADP 2013-14 which was not approved or where no expenditure was made, will be treated as new schemes in 2014-15.

It further said that allocations for rural areas may be enhanced by at least 15pc.

The local government projects, such as topping of roads, street-lights, link roads may be avoided for inclusion in the ADP. Schemes carrying token allocations, zero utilisation or unapproved for the last two consecutive years shall not be proposed for the new ADP.