KARACHI: Former federal minister and Pakistan People’s Party Vice President Senator Sherry Rehman has said it is absolutely irresponsible of the federal government to disregard provinces and their specific needs in the budget-making process.
Commenting on the budget, she questioned the ‘skewed’ distribution of funds to the provinces in the national budget, which is to be presented on Friday. She said that the share of Sindh’s development outlay proposed by the federal government defies the spirit of fiscal federalism.
She said that the provincial allocations made in the document exhibit an alarming bias towards the electoral strongholds of the ruling party – Pakistan Muslim League-N. “This is not a federal budget. It’s a politically parochial budget. It ignores the needs of Pakistan’s largest tax-paying and revenue generating province,” she added.
The PPP leader said it was on record that the Sindh Revenue Board surpassed Rs 49 billion in tax collection this year. “During the first half of the outgoing fiscal year, the Sindh government had already collected Rs 28.45 billion in sales tax, registering a growth of 33 per cent compared with the corresponding period of the previous year. Why then is its development outlay so small?”
She criticised the allocations made by the federal government to the Sindh government. “The allocations being made to the province in the forthcoming budget reflect the federal government’s deliberate negligence of the province’s revenue mobilisation efforts as well as its development needs,” she noted.
She also criticised the federal government’s decision to extend the National Finance Commission award. “The federal government’s policies vis-à-vis budgetary allocation can sow interprovincial discord. Why has the government been reluctant to revise the formula of the National Finance Commission, despite repeated calls by the provinces to do so since the last one expired?”
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