Talking to journalists here on Monday, she said that all the provinces should improve basic health and human conditions in the light of local conditions.
She observed that the reprioritization of development programme would be done to achieve social sector goals but there were interest groups everywhere who promote foreign sponsored agenda and projects.
Kanwal Shauzab said the 18th constitution amendment did not mean allowing the provinces to become 'states within the state' and should be bound under Article 25 of the constitution as to what they ought to do under the development agenda.
She said that the funds should not be given to MNAs and MPAs to spend here and there on untargeted programmes without measuring outcomes.
She said the PTI government would have to change the definition of development budget from mega infrastructure like roads and building projects and shift the focus of spending directly to the people by addressing root causes of poverty and hunger.
Referring to example of one hospital of Bahawalpur in South Punjab, she said a total of 1,380,000 patients visited the outpatient department (OPD) and 85pc of them were referred to the dialysis centre which meant the quality of water and nutrition conditions were to be blamed. She said motorways passed through the area but the people on both sides did not have the access road to reach the hospital or take their produce to the market.
In such conditions, the people of the area were demanding hospital and more dialysis machines. The need under the SDGs should be to address the water quality and ensure its supply to all to block water borne diseases, rather than only building hospitals because by the time a hospital was operationalized the need for 10 more hospitals would arise.
She said the objective of the SDGs should be not to leave anybody behind and poverty, hunger and nutrition should be addressed on top priority. The imported agenda of SDGs would not resolve the issue of poverty and hence the SDG targets should be reframed as per the local conditions.
She said the Voluntary National Review (VNR) for SDGs would be ready by June 2019 as work was underway in consultation with all stakeholders for achieving the desired goals under SDGs but added that Pakistan had not yet worked out exact financing requirement attached to achieve the SDGs and to achieve these goals without the commitment from International community for financing seemed really too much ambitious.
She said that SDGs doesn't requires only paper work as it can be achieved through practical steps that priorities of the goals should be adapted. She said the people of Pakistan were missing from the development priorities as infrastructure development was on the top priority at a time when human development conditions were showing prevalence of an alarming situation.
Kanwal said the planning commission was working on developing Civil Registration and Vital Statistics (CRVS) for identification of 30 percent gap in our data to help achieve Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030. She said that CRVS was the compulsory, continuous, universal and permanent recording of all vital events such as birth and deaths. From these records, vital statistics (VS) on birth, death, cause of death, fertility and mortality (where migration data is also available) can be produced for policy and planning.
It could help connecting data from birth registration to all important events of all individuals' life for achieving the SDGs targets and tracking all other requirements and obligations.
She said it was impossible to achieve SDGs when acute poverty prevailed in many parts of the country especially in Southern Punjab and interior Sindh, she added.