POKHARA, JANUARY 13
Chief Minister of Gandaki province, Krishna Chandra Nepali Pokharel has underscored the need of special initiatives to improving the macroeconomic indicators. He said this was required in the context of the province not making enough progress to match its economic capacity.
Chief Minister Pokharel said this today while addressing the meeting of the Province Development Problems Resolution Committee and the first quarterly progress review seminar of the current fiscal year. Although Gandaki province has special possibilities of development, he said, it has only 8.7 percent contribution to the total GDP of the country.
The chief minister opined that although most of the social indicators were satisfactory, its contribution to the GDP was quite low and this needed to improve.
Stating that the provincial government had set a target of 10.2 per cent average economic growth, he said an investment of Rs 101.2 billion was required for achieving this growth and 64.4 per cent of this investment was expected from the private sector.
"It is necessary to formulate private sector-friendly policy and programme and to adopt a matching working style to bringing as much private sector investment in the economy," he said.
Chief Minister Pokharel expressed dissatisfaction over the level of expenditure in the first quarter of the current fiscal year and urged government bodies to drastically increase development expenditure.
Urging all people's representatives, civil servants and mass of people to help implement policies and programmes, he stressed the need to ease and improve their economic and social lives. Saying that the third wave of COVID-19 had put people's social and economic lives at risk, he said that the provincial government was at work to contain the virus.
He said the government was always effortful to cooperate with the federal government and local levels to intensify development activities while underscoring the need for collective commitments to identify and remove problems facing development.
A version of this article appears in the print on January 14, 2022, of The Himalayan Times.
