No fireworks
For a terror-stricken province, it is all but inevitable for the biggest head of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa budget to be allocated to the maintenance of law and order. Public safety spending saw an increase of 24 percent, hiking the spending to Rs 34 billion rupees.
The way public safety expenditure in KP crowds out the fiscal space for the social sector, amongst others, is sad. But for the people of the beleaguered province, beefing up the civil security agencies is an inevitable cost that must be borne. It is perhaps in recognition of this idea that the ANP-led government didn’t give in to populist temptations and undertake more projects than was fiscally responsible.
Public finance mandarins the country over aren’t too famous for out-of-the-box thinking, those of the KP government being no exception. But this provincial budget saw the interesting output-based budgeting for the health and education departments. The system, where the government had asked districts to achieve specific targets in these fields, has been tried in two districts. Now it is going to be tried out in twelve districts. Who knows, maybe if this exercise is successful, the approach could be emulated by other provinces as well.
Hot on the heels of the federal government, the KP government increased the salaries of its employees by 20 percent. A step that the Punjab government, which presented its budget yesterday, also repeated.
The Punjab budget is the only one budget where ruling political dispensation at the federal level has no ownership. Barring how voters understand which development projects have been initiated by the federal government and which of them by the provincial government, there is much riding on the choice of projects, politically. The Punjab government has chosen to continue the Yellow Cab scheme, the laptop scheme and – the never above suspicion but now downright controversial – Aashiana housing scheme.
Despite conventional wisdom, in the three budgets that have been presented this year, there has been none of the phenomenally large and reckless public spending that pre-election budgets were supposed to have.
That’s not a bad thing.
