Millions of dollars spent on funding “pleasure trips” of Pakistan bureaucrats

"Corrupt Legislation", a famous mural by Elihu Vedder (1896)

HUNDREDS of Pakistani bureaucrats may need to submit what they had learnt from short courses in US after it was alleged that a sizeable portion of a $61 million World Bank loan was actually used up to finance their pleasure trips to US in the name of capacity building, media reports in Pakistan and US said.
The World Bank programme that was launched between 2004 and 2009, actually facilitated over 300 bureaucrats traveling to...
USA for short-term training courses. But there is no record on what they had learned in those foreign institutions after spending huge resources.
“This is the one poor country where millions of dollars are spent just on pleasure trips of bureaucrats,” chairman of Pakistan’s Public Accounts Committee Nadeem Afzal Chan said after asking for a report on the utilization of the World Bank fund allotted for human resource development in bureaucracy, according to reports published in The Express Tribune which was also reproduced by International Herald Tribune.
Out of the total money, $26 million was handled by Pakistan’s Establishment Division for civil servants’ reforms. It was also alleged that some officers who landed up in US did not even enroll in the courses they were to attend, and some of them returned with diplomas rather than degrees. The media reports quoting auditors have also published the names of some of those bureaucrats.

Will more IAS be produced in London?
India’s sports minister Ajay Maken has announced that Olympics bronze medal winner Gagan Narang will be offered an IAS equivalent job in the Sports Authority of India. According to new sports policy approved by the cabinet, the medal winners in the Olympics, Commonwealth Games, Asian Games and World Championships straight away qualify to be an IAS officer. The question now is how many more IAS will be produced by London Olympics. BoI congratulates “IAS” Narang and gives very best wishes to other aspirants.