Dr. Nguyen Huu Nguyen, from National Strategy and Policy Research Center under HCMC Social Sciences and Humanities University, said that the city should make clear concept “breakthrough” to draw right solutions to implement the programs from that base.
According to Mr. Nguyen, breakthrough means concentrating strengths to influence key phases, break old status and create suddenly big changes.
Successful breakthroughs required sufficient resources, right purposes and right time. Lacking one of these factors, results might not be as expected. Much investment did not mean successful breakthrough, said Mr. Nguyen.
Sharing the same view, former deputy secretary of the city Party’s Committee Pham Chanh Truc stressed that the city must address key issues in each program and focus on solving them.
For instance, traffic jam has been caused by mechanical population increase. Residents from rural areas have kept flowing to the city to study and work because their hometowns do not have many businesses, high quality schools and hospitals. The key problem in the traffic jam breakthrough program is the quick population increase.
Mr. Truc said that formerly HCMC was planned for only four million residents. Now the number reaches 12-13 million.
Therefore, road expansion and bridge construction are not radical solutions. Forces of production need be rearranged through economic measures in the entire southern region, from the Mekong Delta to the mid central region and the southern Central Highlands.
The central Government and HCMC should assist provinces to develop production and traffic infrastructures, create jobs as well as services and amenities.
Mr. Truc pointed out many irrational points in urban planning. The city has permitted construction of buildings in the center area. That will only benefits businesses and titans who are able to own gold land parcels but break the city’s plan. As a result, flooding and traffic jam have been serious with people streaming to the center area.
Urban planning needs to reorganize urban space and urban development should be reasonable and harmony instead of being spontaneous or according to subjective wishes.
The key matter in urban planning now is to develop a multi-center city for residents to live, work, study and use public services and amenities under the same conditions in different areas.
He said that the key matter in administrative reform was e-government, which should be developed to dismiss unqualified cadres with poor public service morality. From that, the city would have conditions to increase wages for cadres and officials in line with their working responsibility.
That was an effective way to fight corruption and remove “ask-give” mechanism.
In environmental field, he said that the key matter was urban waste treatment.
In education and training, he said it would be difficult and unintelligible to create breakthroughs with common targets such as a human resource training program. So he suggested targeting an educational field, such as vocational training to improve workers’ skills, productivity and growth quality.
Businesses subject of action
Dr. Huynh Thanh Dien, member of the Support Industry Project Development Consulting Group of the city, said that seven breakthrough programs have a close relationship. Of these administrative reform is the most important one, which is breakthrough of breakthrough.
According to Mr. Dien, the seven programs have been carried out slowly for the last past mostly because of complicated implementation mechanisms from study, approval, funding, bidding invitation to capital disbursement.
Not only businesses attending the programs have met with difficulties in administrative procedures but also government agencies have also faced conflicts in implementation coordination. That has slowed progress of some programs.
So he suggested the city to change complicated mechanisms or propose the Government to do so if the change is out of the city’s jurisdiction.
In addition, he proposed that each program should to clearly determine missions implemented by agencies under the city People’s Committee and those by district authorities. From that the city can draw a clear coordination mechanism among all level governments to synchronously implement the program.
Businesses should be considered as the subject of implementation not government agencies, who should keep the role of creating programs and mechanisms to lure businesses to carry out them.
Programs relating traffic infrastructure, flooding, environment and urban planning should pay attention to public private partnership (PPP) capital source. Private economic sector’s attendance will speed up the progress and quality of works.
In addition, the city can propose the Government to permit a specific reward mechanism for officials and cadres for well implementing the seven breakthrough programs, he added.
