LAHORE, Aug 5: Punjab Finance Minister Sardar Hasnain Bahadur Dareshak has said the annual report on the interim Provincial Finance Commission award would be finalized by next month.

He said the report would be sent to all stakeholders, including district governments and donors, during the current month for their suggestions before finalizing it. He hoped that the PFC award would be finalized before the end of the current fiscal.

The sixth NFC award would be finalized soon and the next provincial budgets prepared under it, the minister told newsmen after speaking at the last session of the two-day workshop on 'Concepts and practices of inter-governmental finance.' The workshop was organized by the Decentralization Support programme under the Punjab finance department at a local hotel.

The minister said the sixth NFC award was being finalized under the leadership of Shaukat Aziz. Talking about the Punjab's interim resource sharing formula, he said, under the interim PFC award, 67 per cent of the resources were being distributed among 34 districts of the province on a population basis. It was followed by 33 per cent under the parameter of under-development.

He said the interim award was based on a study carried out by the Punjab Economic Research Institute. The report of this study, the minister maintained, did not yield authentic data required for an ideal distribution of resources among the districts.

He also said the finance department had been completely automated. Earlier, speaking at the concluding ceremony of the workshop, the finance minister averred that PFCs, though still in a nascent state, had a vital function in the provincial support for the local governments.

The Punjab, he said, believed that the institutional development of the PFCs (both legal and technical side) would help them in performing their role to ensure timely and adequate transfers of resources to local governments.

Asian Development Bank consultant Roy Bahl also spoke on the occasion. Punjab Planning and Development Board chairman Salman Ghani addressed the participants in the morning session.

Balochistan Finance Secretary Zahid Mahmood, NWFP Finance Secretary Ziaur Rahman and Sialkot District Nazim Mian Naeem Javed attended the workshop among others. The two-day workshop, which was opened by provincial local government minister Raja Muhammad Basharat on Wednesday, was arranged by the decentralization support programme with the support of the ADB and initiated by the government.

The programme has been designed to meet the specific problems arising from the implementation of the new local government system. An amount of Rs55 million is being spent under the programme to support and strengthen the PFCs in the four provinces. The ADB has mobilized international expertise from its grant financing for holding the workshop.

The local government minister in his brief inaugural address hoped that the local and international experts would come up with innovative approaches in fiscal transfers, which could be easily tailored to the country's system.

ADB's senior governance specialist Douglas Porter highlighted in one of the sessions the importance of efficient functioning of the PFCs for fiscal decentralization. He said the current trend in fiscal transfers moving from direct resources to the allocation of resources was based on performance.

While welcoming the provincial finance minister, programme's provincial director Babar Yaqoob Fateh Muhammad said the PFCs had an important function and their effectiveness was fundamental for the financial stability of the local governments.