PESHAWAR: Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Chief Minister Mahmood Khan said on Sunday that the province did not get its due share of federal transfers as the poverty-related needs and thinly spread population of merged areas had not been included in calculating the province’s share in transfers.

In a statement issued here, Mr Khan said that using mean per capita expenditures in the four provinces and the same statistics for defunct Fata, the underfunding of Fata came to Rs377 billion in 2018 over the last one decade alone.

“Projected for the last seven decades since independence, the total size of under-financing of Fata comes to at least Rs2,639 billion,” he said, adding that all along the residents of ex-Fata continued to bear a proportionate burden of the indirect taxes that in turn contributed 60 per cent of total national revenue at the federal level.

Mahmood says mean spending in provinces under NFC transfers remained well above former Fata

The chief minister said that in the last decade the National Finance Commission (NFC) transfers contributed to keep mean values of Rs13,261 per capita per annum public expenditures for Punjab, Rs16,489 in Sindh, Rs19,480 in Balochistan and Rs14,165 per capita in KP.

“Fata never enjoyed such mandated transfers and consequently the level of public expenditure in the region remained at a mean value of Rs8,411 per capita,” he said.

He said that figures for last decade showed that mean spending in Punjab, Sindh, KP and Balochistan under NFC transfers remained at levels well above ex-Fata and in some cases twice the per capita spending in region.

He said that this had led to deterioration of social sectors in the region.

“At present 0.45 million children remain out of school, road connectivity despite the difficult geographic terrain remains 0.26km per square kilometre and maternal mortality at 375 mothers losing lives during childbirth,” Mr Khan said.

He said that only in recent years the former Fata received Rs50 billion of public expenditure per year, but got much less of financing for public services.

The chief minister said that each district of Pakistan had scores of offices of departments providing services to the people, which in case of Fata were conspicuous by their absence, carrying on a low cost and low service model of governance.

He said that the big question of national importance today was how to right the wrong, and how quickly; and how soon to regain the already lost 50 years of development for people of the region.

Mr Khan expressed his views on the NFC issue in the backdrop of economic slowdown that was likely to impact the revenue stream of cash-strapped province, which historically looked towards Islamabad for most of its resources.

A previous government’s decision to allocate three per cent of NFC share to development of the defunct Fata had also met resistance from Sindh and Balochistan and only federal, KP and Punjab governments had informally agreed to contribute funds for the development of merged districts.

An initial strategy plans to spend about a trillion rupees on the development of the region over a period of a decade.

Published in Dawn, June 3rd, 2019