Infra plans shouldn’t stop at 10 years

NEXT month, the Construction Industry Authority of the Philippines ( CIAP) will publicly launch a P40-trillion, 10-year roadmap to continue the aggressive infrastructure drive begun with the Duterte administration’s “Build, Build, Build” program. This is such a welcome development that will serve the country better if the plan imposes no time limit.

The Construction Industry Roadmap 2030 proposes to spend P4 trillion per year on infrastructure over the next 10 years, beginning this year. The plan expands the current infrastructure drive to include housing and tourism infrastructure, and is expected to create up to 800,000 new jobs in the construction sector, according to CIAP chief Rowel Barba.

Executive Director Barry Paulino of the Philippine Con feature of the roadmap is its development plan for creating new skilled labor. The roadmap will train 300,000 skilled workers over the 10-year period, Paulino said.

As Barba, who is also undersecretary for the Competitiveness and Ease of Doing Business Group, pointed out, the roadmap will require legislative action to set it in motion, but the fact that Congress will have a coherent, detailed plan to assess once it returns to work after the May elections is promising. Worthwhile government initiatives historically do not live beyond the term of the administration that conceives and implements them, with the unfortunate result that many good ideas are never completed, or even earnestly begun.

Infrastructure development, in particular, has suffered from the pattern of discontinuous attention because of the complexity and necessarily multi-year timeframe of many vital projects. A familiar example would be the long overdue replacement for the outdated and overworked NAIA. Ideas for - trations ago, but it is only now that any serious proposal has begun to coalesce; and even so, the chances of it progressing to the stage of actual construction before Duterte’s term ends in 2022 still look slim at this point.

A 10-year plan powered by legislation does obviate some of the problem of “short-termism,” but only by extending strategic planning for a few years. The country’s need for sound and well developed infrastructure, however, has no expiration date. As the population grows, its need for infrastructure grows and shifts right along with it.

The lessons of examples such as the MRT-3 should not be ignored: Considered a highly progressive development when the time the current administration prioritized salvaging and upgrading it, the MRT-3 had deteriorated to the point of near uselessness.

As an area of policy focus, infrastructure should be viewed realistically as a need that is dynamic and continuous. Rather should, instead, consider ways to internalize the positive policy proposals of the Construction Industry Roadmap 2030 and make them a normal way for the Philippine government — regardless of who leads it — to do business.

For instance, the proposed spending levels for infrastructure could quite easily be made a permanent part of public policy; so, too, could the roadmap’s framework for job creation and skills development. A sustainable policy is likely to require giving relevant agencies more authority to select and fund projects, but streamlining and regularizing areas such as project awarding and procurement — the rules for which seem to change with each change of administration

In the context of what has been the usual way of doing business, the Construction Industry Roadmap 2030 does represent a good step forward. But much more could be done to enhance the effectiveness and sustainability of policy.