Infrastructure planning & implementation: TI-P flags corruption risks, governance gaps

ISLAMABAD: The Transparency International Pakistan (TI-P) has unveiled its flagship report, “Infrastructure Corruption Risk Assessment (ICRAT): Assessment of Governance Gaps in Infrastructure Planning and Implementation in Pakistan,” highlighting significant weaknesses in the practical implementation of infrastructure.

The report is the first application in Pakistan of the Infrastructure Corruption Risk Assessment Tool developed by Transparency International Australia and assesses the broader environment in which public infrastructure is planned, appraised, procured, and delivered.

The report’s central finding is that Pakistan has built a sound, formal framework for infrastructure governance but its application in practice remains uneven and weak. The assessment assigns Pakistan an overall context risk score of 6.34 out of 10, placing its infrastructure governance in the High ICRAT risk category. The high risk suggests that the infrastructure project identification, approval, authorisation and procurement processes are vulnerable to governance weaknesses. The report also notes that Pakistan’s macro-fiscal environment is a core constraint on infrastructure delivery.

It further notes that under fiscal pressure and short political cycles, project selection tends to prioritise visibility over technical merit. Discretionary development spending expands around election cycles, while the non-adherence to prioritisation framework has led to an overstretched pipeline. The PSDP “throw-forward” (unfunded commitments from approved projects) now exceeds Rs 10 trillion against an annual allocation of roughly Rs 1 trillion, meaning completion would take more than a decade at current funding levels. A similar gap between rules and practice is visible in procurement. While the PPRA Rules 2004 establish principles of open competition, successive amendments have created broad exemptions. The report finds that the NHA increasingly relies on PPRA Rule 42(f) to award large contracts directly to state-owned entities, bypassing competitive bidding. This restricts private sector participation in infrastructure markets.

TI Pakistan’s Executive Director, Kashif Ali said the recent public investment management reforms have strengthened appraisal requirements, introduced climate vulnerability considerations into project assessment, revised approval thresholds and implemented the Intelligent Project Automation System (iPAS). These represent meaningful steps. The diagnostic report however, has noted that the key challenge for infrastructure governance in Pakistan is not regulatory design but structural gap between the commitments embedded in rules and frameworks and their effective implementation.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2026