LAHORE:
The 2011-12 budget does not allocate enough resources to southern Punjab and the provincial government must come up with a fairer method for the distribution of resources based on population and area, opposition members of the Punjab Assembly from South Punjab said on Tuesday.
The MPAs chanted slogans like ‘Assan qaidi takht Lahore de’ (We are prisoners of the throne of Lahore), while others said they could ‘smell cotton’ in the provincial capital, implying that the city has been built on the back of revenue extracted from the cotton fields of southern Punjab.
MPA Dr Muhammad Akhtar Malik (Pakistan Peoples Party) from Multan said the figures printed in the budget document were a product of “jugglery” and proceeded to compare the allocations for southern Punjab to overall spending.
He said that of the Rs4,873 million allocated for the establishment of colleges, only Rs809 million was for southern Punjab. Of the 833 colleges to be upgraded from intermediate to degree status, only 120 were in the south.
Malik said that of the Rs18,294.4 million for medical education, Rs5,440 million was for southern Punjab. He said that of the total Rs12,001.5 million allocated for water supply schemes, only Rs1,263 million was for southern Punjab. Of the Rs3,336.4 million for rural water supply schemes, only Rs623.5 million was for southern Punjab. He said that Rs2,887.5 million had been allocated for new rural drainage schemes, with only Rs276 million for southern Punjab.
He said that the budget included Rs5,700 million in block allocations and Rs9,450 million for new schemes in northern and central Punjab. The block allocations, he said, were at the chief minister’s discretion to spend. He said that the Punjab government had allocated Rs70 billion for the south, but only Rs10 billion would be released this year. He said that last year, Rs5 billion had been allocated but only Rs800 million had been released so far.
Malik said that the federal and provincial government collected a lot of revenue from southern Punjab from the taxes on agriculture inputs and others but spent little on the region. He said that there should be a provincial finance commission, like the National Finance Commission, to determine the distribution of resources among the districts on the basis of size, population and poverty.
He criticised the Punjab government for giving up some types of foreign aid, saying the money was being spent on development in rural areas of the south. He said that the MPAs from southern Punjab could ‘smell cotton on the streets of Lahore’.
MPA Athar Hassan Gorchani (PPP) spoke about the deprivation in DG Khan and Rajanpur. He said that millions of rupees had been allocated for solar tube well but not one had been installed in these districts. The government had announced that it would open a medical school in DG Khan in 2008 but it had not materialised yet.
He said that none of the dykes and embankments destroyed in last year’s floods had yet been repaired. He said that every year, hill torrents devastated these areas but the government had yet to create a system to manage them and protect the local population.
Pakistan Muslim League-Functional parliamentary leader Makhdoom Syed Ahmad Mehmood from Rahim Yar Khan said that the provincial government should immediately restore the local government system to devolve power to the districts.
He suggested that the Punjab government create a two-tier tax system for the north and south. “The people of Lahore can pay more taxes than the people of southern Punjab because most of the development has been in Lahore. The city’s map changes every six months,” he said.
He said the people of southern Punjab saw that their resources were being spent on Lahore and that was why they supported the idea of a separate province.
If the government taxed people in Lahore more, demands for a separate province would ease, he said.
Also on Tuesday, MPAs Dr Muhammad Ashraf Chohan (PML-Nawaz) and Dr Samia Amjad (PML-Quaid) got into an ugly exchange of words that the speaker ordered expunged from the record. Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif visited the house but did not participate in proceedings, though he presided over meetings of parliamentary secretaries and chairmen of standing committees earlier.
Published in The Express Tribune, June 15th, 2011.
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