ISLAMABAD:
While Sindh and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa have been making loud, and at time outrageous, demands in the run-up to the negotiations for the 8th National Finance Commission Award, Balochistan’s delegation has been surprisingly coy about its demands, according to local media sources.
While Balochistan Chief Minister Abdul Malik Baloch is leading the delegation, the province’s brain trust is run by Kaiser Bengali, a Karachi-based economist who previously ran Sindh’s highly successful negotiations for the 7th NFC Award in 2009. When approached by The Express Tribune to comment on the NFC negotiations, Bengali freely spoke about matters relating to fiscal policy in general, but refused to comment on the specifics of his province’s demands, authorities stated.
“It is not proper to deliberate the commission’s agenda through the media,” he said. “The provinces will have to demonstrate a responsible attitude during their debate as it is an important national forum. It is not a trade union.”
For instance, he said, Balochistan, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and Sindh all opposed Punjab’s demand to make population the sole criterion for allocating funds to the provinces. The NFC meets every five years to decide the distribution of federal tax revenues between the federal government and the provinces. Under the current NFC, which expires on June 30 of this year, 57.5% of the federal divisible pool – meaning income taxes and sales taxes – are devolved to the provinces. Of that amount, 82% is awarded based on provincial population, 10.3% based on poverty and lack of infrastructure, 5% on revenue collection, and 2.7% on the basis of inverse population density, sources claimed.
Bengali did endorse some proposals by the K-P delegation that were recently made public, such as making the federal excise duty on crude oil payable to provinces instead of Islamabad, sources stated.
However, the Balochistan delegation member was a little more measured on K-P’s call for a larger share of the federal development budget to go to K-P and Balochistan. K-P officials have alleged that Punjab and Sindh get a disproportionate share of those funds.
