KARACHI, Nov 2: The Pakistan People’s Party has maintained that the appointment of a tribunal on the question of computing hydel profits for NWFP is yet another ploy of the federal government to bypass and further postpone the payment of due hydel profits to that province.
In a statement issued from Bilawal House on Wednesday, PPP’s Information Secretary and member of the National Finance Commission Senator Taj Haider said that hydel profits to the provinces, which produced hydro-electricity, had been sanctioned under the constitution’s Article 161 (2) as ‘direct transfers’.
“A detailed explanation following this article which gives the guidelines to calculate these profits is also an integral part of the constitution. It should also be remembered that this is one of those constitutional provisions that had made the unanimous signing of the 1973 constitution possible.”
Senator Haider recalled that in the late ’80s, the federal government had set up a committee to look into the matter. The committee, with the assistance of reputed foreign consultants, had come up with a formula to calculate hydel profits in accordance with the constitutional guidelines. This formula was accepted by all the parties to the dispute. The political sub-committee of the National Finance Commission, formed in 1995, had found this formula in order and the joint agreement signed by all four provinces represented on this sub-committee had recommended that hydel profits must be calculated and paid according to this formula.
Unfortunately, he said, the profits had all along been arbitrarily determined by the federal government. Currently, the NWFP was losing Rs12 billion every year on account of this arbitrary practice.
The federal government had started treating this amount of constitutional direct transfers more or less as a ‘grant in aid’ made by them. The obvious purpose was to contain the federal deficits by depriving the provinces of their rightful amounts, he said.
Senator Haider said that no NFC Award was needed for paying due hydel profits to the NWFP as direct transfers. It was most surprising to note that the MMA government in the NWFP had also become a party to the reopening of this settled issue by agreeing to the setting up of a fresh tribunal, he said.
He demanded that the province be paid its constitutional dues calculated according to the already agreed formula without any delay, especially at the present time when it was badly in need of resources because of the havoc wreaked by the quake.
