Despite the Budget Priorities Committee unanimously recommending abolition of the ‘discretionary funds’ of the prime minister and parliamentarians in the next budget, the interim administration has passed the buck to the next government.
According to a local newspaper, the inter-ministerial Budget Priorities Committee decided not to allocate Rs27billion for ‘discretionary spending’ for the financial year 2013-14, following the reckless spending spree by former prime minister Raja Pervaiz Ashraf.
“The caretaker set-up cannot take such a crucial decision,” said a senior finance ministry official. “It’s for the political leadership to decide,” he added.
For the next fiscal, a sum of Rs5billion has been proposed for the Peoples Works Programme-I (PWP-I) – a pool created to allocate Rs10million in annual grant to every member of the National Assembly and Senate. A sum of Rs22billion has been proposed to be set aside under the PWP-II, which is the discretionary budget of the prime minister.
The amount, Rs27 billion, is part of the overall Rs450 billion proposed federal development budget for the next fiscal year, commencing July 2013. The Planning Commission also supported abolition of the practice but its contention was that Rs27billion should be given to the PC to keep the overall size of the budget at Rs450billion.
During his nine month stint as prime minister, Raja spent Rs47.6 billion in addition to Rs5billion allocated for parliamentarians, as against the whole year’s combined allocation of Rs27billion for the premier and parliamentarians.
The Supreme Court has also taken suo motu notice of Raja’s reckless spending. During Tuesday’s hearing, it was revealed that the premier doled out taxpayers’ money to non-parliamentarians like Raja Basharat of Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid, who is contesting the May 11 polls from NA-52 (Rawalpindi).
The Budget Priorities Committee’s recommendation has also been forwarded to the finance ministry seeking its decision and to the Annual Plan Coordination Committee (APCC).
The APCC is headed by the deputy chairman of the PC and is empowered to finalise the development budget and also clear macroeconomic targets for the final approval of the National Economic Council, which is headed by the premier with the chief ministers of Sindh, Punjab, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, Balochistan and Gilgit-Baltistan and the AJK prime minister as its members.