LAHORE:The Punjab government is likely to increase Annual Development Plan (ADP) by over 40 percent in forthcoming budget 2021-22 crossing it Rs500 billion from ongoing Rs350 billion following the federal finance minister’s consumption-based economic revival policy.
Further, to implement the PTI election agenda of South Punjab, it has also decided to allocate at least 35 percent funds under each sector which would be reserved for development schemes of South Punjab. The government has planned to allocate almost Rs175 billion ADP amount for the South Punjab uplift project. However, the utilisation of this amount will be questionable due to administrative department’s limited working capacity.
According to the official documents of the first draft prepared by the planning and development board of Punjab and presented to the chief minister, almost Rs270 billion would be allocated for ongoing development scheme, Rs138 billion for new schemes and Rs92 billion for other development projects.
According to the planning and development board and finance department officials, the government is optimistic about achieving its revenue collection targets while Punjab Revenue Authority already performed exponentially in revenue collection. As a result of the PRA performance, the government has already upward revised its revenue collection target and anticipating that it will cross Rs140 billion revenue collection mark this year. However, the Board of Revenue (BOR) and Excise and Taxation (E&T) will likely to miss the revenue collection targets but the next year with ongoing reforms, policy decisions and new taxes through finance bill they will also achieve the revenue targets. Further, the FBR is also performing well so no major deductions would be made from divisible pool share, they observed.
Further, the government has also decided to make two separate volumes of ADP - one each for South Punjab and rest of Punjab alongside separate scheme would be reflected in Volume-II for 11 districts of South Punjab.
Similarly, allocation for Punjab-based vertical projects would be divided on population basis and reflected against respective regions and districts. The revised estimates of the Fiscal Year 2020-21 would also be reflected separately under Vol-I and Vol-II for each region.
According to the proposed first draft of the ADP, the highest development allocation is proposed for the health sector with over Rs141 billion funds, out of which, a sum of Rs100 billion is proposed to specialised healthcare and medical education and Rs41.66 billion to primary and secondary health care. Similarly, a sum of Rs45 billion is proposed for the education sector development projects, out of which, Rs35billion proposed for higher education, Rs10.24 billion for school education, Rs3.495 billion for literacy and non-formal education, Rs6.27 billion for sports and youth affairs. The government has also proposed Rs58.24 billion for water supply and sanitation projects, Rs44 billion for irrigation projects, Rs12.90 billion for energy sector projects, Rs25 billion for agriculture development projects, Rs28 billion to transport projects. The government has planned Rs18.86 billion for the governance and information technology projects, almost Rs10 billion for industry, commerce and investment projects in which cheap loans would be given to youths.
Further, Rs32 billion was proposed for the urban development projects, Rs4 billion for environment and climate change projects, Rs2.23 billion for mines and minerals development projects, Rs4.2 billion for forestry development projects, Rs1.24 billion for wildlife development projects and Rs1.67 billion for fisheries development projects while Rs2.27 billion for social welfare and a sum of Rs2 billion was proposed for population welfare development projects.