PESHAWAR    -    President Dr Arif Alvi on Wednesday stressed the need to undertake financially sustainable and vi­able development projects, besides reducing pil­ferage in government departments’ expenditures to enhance efficiency and reduce the financial bur­den on governments. 

He said that better planning and implementa­tion of development projects by the trained and qualified development professionals could help improve overall service delivery in the country and help meet people’s expectations. 

The president expressed these views during a briefing on the development projects in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), at Governor House, Peshawar, President Secretariat Press Wing said in a press re­lease. Provincial Minister for Health and 

Finance Taimoor Saleem Jhagra, chief secretary KP and other senior officials attended the meeting. 

Addressing the meeting, the president said that better financial controls and enhanced account­ability of government departments would help im­prove the efficiency and efficacy of development projects, besides help reduce the financial burden on the national and provincial exchequers.

He appreciated the development activities un­dertaken by the provincial government in KP, and highlighted the need to overcome the gap between people’s expectations and service delivery. 

He said that necessary infrastructure and basic facilities, particularly in the health and education­al sectors, needed to be commensurate with the people’s needs, adding that better planning and implementation of development projects could help meet the supply-demand gap. 

The president also highlighted the need to fo­cus on the prevention of diseases, both commu­nicable and non-communicable diseases, adding that the overall disease burden could be reduced by adopting necessary precautionary measures and healthy living. This, he said, would help reduce the burden on government health in­frastructure and save precious resources. The president said that Alternate Dispute Resolu­tion (ADR) mechanisms could be adopted in the newly-merged districts (NMDs) of KP to provide speedy and timely redressal to people’s griev­ances in those areas. This would also reduce the burden on the traditional justice system, besides helping improve the overall law and order situa­tion in the region, he added. 

During the meeting, the president was briefed about different development projects undertaken by the KP government and the overall law and or­der situation in the province