Bac Kan province was re-established in 1997 with agriculture as a backbone economic sector. After more than 15 years of reform, Bac Kan province has gradually made importantly positive progresses in socio-economic development, raised living standards of local people, and improved the investment and business environment to draw more investment in capital to promote local economic development. Presently, Bac Kan province is focusing on completing infrastructure system as well as speeding up administrative reform to better serve overall development.
Improving infrastructure
In the past years, the implementation of Resolution No. 13-NQ/TW of the Party Central Committee, 11th term, on “Building synchronised infrastructure system to make our country a basically modern industrial nation by 2020″ has made big changes in the perception of State and Party officials in the importance of infrastructure construction tasks to socio-economic development in Bac Kan province. To date, Bac Kan has 126 km of national roads, 84 km of asphalted provincial roads, 16.9 km of concreted district roads and 447.5 km of reinforced roads leading to administrative centres of communes.
Currently, 84.2 percent of villages in the province have strongly founded roads to village centres and 108 communes, wards and towns have roads capable of supporting automobiles throughout the year. The road network of the province is built in compliance with the road system development of the country and the northern mountainous area. The province has assigned priority to building and upgrading roads to tourist sites and administrative centres. Some key traffic infrastructure projects have been basically completed and put into use, including Provincial Road 258 to extremely difficult mountainous communes and Provincial Road from Bac Kan to Cho Don.
Every year, the province’s power supply system is upgraded and repaired to basically meet the demand from producers and citizens. Total length of high-voltage lines in Bac Kan province is 1,502.38 km, of which 73 km is 220-kV line, 137.8 km is 100-kV line, 1,363.85 km is 35-kV line and 1,570.89 km is 4-kV line. To date, the province has a total of 781 efficiently operating transformers and has three operational hydropower plants connected to the national power grid, namely Ta Lang 4.5 MW) Thuong An (2.4 MW) and Nam Cat (3.2 MW).
Accelerating administrative reform
In public administration reform, the Bac Kan Provincial People’s Committee issued action plans to implement public administration reform tasks in the 2011-2015 period, including annualised action plans, and instructed its subordinates to implement. Thus, in the first six months of 2013, public administration reform like institutional reform, administrative procedural reform, organisational reform and personnel quality improvement has achieved certain results. The Provincial People’s Committee has directed the Department of Interiors to work with relevant units to carry out the “Accelerating public mission and public personnel regime reform” project.
Specially, although Bac Kan is a poor mountainous province, it actively applies IT to administrative procedure reform to better serve citizens and businesses (ranked 24th out of 63 provinces and cities by the Ministry of Information and Communications in 2012). Document management software for administrative formalities has been installed and deployed in Bac Kan Town and four districts of Bach Thong, Cho Moi, Na Ri and Pac Nam for nearly four years. In 2013, the State Treasury of Bac Kan province has effectively implemented the budgetary – treasury information management system (also called TABMIS Project) to unify mechanisms and processes of budget collection and spending, unify budgetary collection and spending decentralisation management, concentrating budget collection and spending information synchronously and immediately.
Every year, the Provincial People’s Committee hosts meetings with local businesses to listen to their ideas and seek best solutions to enterprise development.
Enhancing provincial competitiveness
In the past years, the provincial competitiveness index (PCI) of Bac Kan province has been always ranked to the bottom of the country (ranked 58th out of 63 provinces and cities in 2010 and 60th in 2012). This reflects the fact that Bac Kan province is having certain limitations in investment and business policies, mechanisms and environment. Being fully aware of such shortages, to create an open and transparent investment environment, Bac Kan province has focused on directing local governments and organs to gradually improve investment climate and raise competitiveness, aiming to: Build a friendly investment and business environment, create favourable conditions for enterprises to boost operations and improve provincial competitiveness index. The province hopes to enter the group of provinces with good competitiveness by 2015 from the average group at present. According to the Plan No. 401/KH-UBND dated November 27, 2012 on actions for better provincial competitiveness in the period from 2012 to 2015 issued by the Bac Kan Provincial People’s Committee, the province will focus on some solutions to enhance provincial competitiveness index in the coming years.
The provincial government will request all relevant units and branches to speed up administrative reform, focused on simplification, transparency and publicity of administrative procedures, in order to build a better public administrative service. The province will build the true “one-stop source” mechanism in all fields, facilitate the business community to work with administrative procedures with the shortest time and least expenses. It will also support enterprises to approach and study the province’s socioeconomic development strategies, directions and plans and actively support them to deal with questions regarding doing business in the province to persuade them to bring their projects to the province. Besides, the province seriously redresses officers and civil servants with improper attitude and service. In addition to efforts of enterprises, governments at all levels should have encouragement and support policies for enterprises such as financial support, capital access support, scientific and technological support, equipment renovation support, personnel training support and trade promotion support.
Bac Kan province will apply State business support mechanisms and policies efficiently in order to prevent the reliance on State supports as some enterprises are doing now. It will support enterprises to enhance the governance and strategy management capability of business managers, strengthen connectivity of enterprises inside and outside the province to raise product quality and boost competitiveness in the market because up to 98 percent of businesses in Bac Kan have small and medium-sized scale, weak competitiveness and limited capacity. It will also support enterprises to rationalise business strategies, human resources development, new technological investment and new management method application to create products of high value at competitive prices to make inroads into domestic and export markets.
Le Sang
Đăng ký: VietNam News