PTI doled out Rs142bn discretionary funds

ISLAMABAD: Without placement of any well-defined monitoring mechanism, the PTI government in the last four years' rule doled out discretionary funds to the tune of Rs142 billion through the ruling party’s parliamentarians for the execution of hundreds of thousands of small development schemes.

Despite criticism hurled by former Prime Minister Imran Khan on the utilization of funds on such discretionary programmes in the past, his government continued providing highly objectionable funds to the ruling party’s parliamentarians under the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Social Action Program (SAP) in the last four years. Such discretionary funds are considered a tool to muster political support. The former premier had announced Rs500 million in funding for parliamentarians last January 2022 but it is not yet known how much was released in the current fiscal year.

Although, the PTI-led government had allocated Rs64 billion for the current fiscal year 2021-22 under the SDGs programme and the lump sum amount was released to respective provincial governments, the utilization of funds so far stood at Rs10.78 billion till March 2022.

“Out of the total allocated funds of Rs142 billion in last four years, the utilization so far stood at Rs88 billion and it might be fully utilized by the end of the current fiscal year,” top official sources confirmed to The News here on Thursday.

When contacted, Federal Minister for Planning Ahsan Iqbal said the government would conduct an audit of the SDG's funding on the SAP programme to ascertain factual spending. However, the sources said a major chunk of funding in the last four years nearly over 80 per cent was largely utilized in Punjab. Even keeping the geographical distribution of funds aside for the time being, there has been another alarming aspect that no one exactly knew how much funding was spent on the ground and whether these development schemes were sustainable or it was wasted, going into the drain.

The official record showed that the government utilized Rs24 billion on the SDGs programme for SAP in 2018-19, Rs30 billion in 2019-20, and Rs24 billion for 2020-21. The Imran Khan-led government had allocated Rs68 billion on the eve of the budget for 2021-22, but the official records showed that the allocation for the SDGs programme stood at Rs64 billion for the current fiscal year under SAP, which was released to the federal ministries and provincial governments as per the SAP’s guidelines on the recommendations of its Steering Committee.

Top official sources stated that as per guidelines lump-sum funds are released to federal ministries/provincial governments for the execution of development schemes identified by the residents of an area instead of parliamentarians. “As reported by the execution agencies i.e. the relevant provincial governments and the federal ministries utilised Rs10.785 billion by March 2022."

In the papers, this scheme is meant for execution on the basis of 50:50 per cent cost-sharing by the federal and provincial governments. This did not happen this time around and the federal government fully provided funds for the scheme in addition to the massive amounts provided to the provinces under the NFC Award.

The Steering Committee minutes showed that it was discussed at length to place an effective monitoring mechanism and it was planned to assign NGOs to undertake such exercise. Earlier, it was discussed that the respective planning departments would be assigned to discharge such responsibility but they refused, citing lack of required human resources for conducting monitoring.

The government could assign such retired officers who possessed in-depth knowledge for conducting on-ground monitoring of the development schemes executed in far-flung areas by utilizing multi-billion rupees in the past.

This scribe contacted former Minister for Planning and PTI leader Asad Umar for seeking his comments; he said the SDGs programme was basically given to the provinces and their governments were responsible for the execution of projects and monitoring. He said he had placed an outsourced monitoring mechanism in the last few months and the Planning Commission received a report just a couple of weeks ago. He said that this monitoring report had covered a few cities where SDGs funds were utilized and largely these development schemes were executed properly.

When UK-based Pakistani economist Yousuf Nazar was asked to comment on Thursday, he replied that Imran Khan announced Rs500 million to be given to each MNA and MPA as an uplift grant in January 2021. "I don’t know how much of it was disbursed and how much was utilized. Where is the record," he questioned.