PESHAWAR: CM urged to look into ‘unjust’ funding by MMA govt
By Mohammad Ali Khan
PESHAWAR, Oct 24: A federal minister belonging to the NWFP has asked the caretaker chief minister Shamsul Mulk to take notice of what he calls the ‘uneven’ allocation of development funds by the outgoing MMA government in the province, according to officials.
Salim Saifullah Khan, minister for inter-provincial coordination, recently sent a letter to the caretaker chief minister, accusing the government led by the alliance of religious parties of adopting questionable funding policies, as reflected in the Annual Development Programme, an official told Dawn.
The minister, said the official, criticised the MMA government for its development policies and requested inquiries at the district level to know the actual proportion of funds spent by the previous set-up during its five-year rule.
Mr Khan, when contacted for comments, confirmed the dispatch of a communication to the caretaker chief minister, adding that the ‘stalwarts’ of the MMA government had not allocated funds on an equitable basis, which created an imbalance in the province.
Elaborating his position, he said: “I just brought to the notice of the caretaker chief minister unequal distribution of funds by the outgoing government and urged him to right the wrongs.”
When asked about the response from the chief minister’s secretariat on his letter, the minister replied that he was yet to hear anything from the other side.
Officials at the planning and development department, being the focal agency for ADP implementation, said they were yet to receive new guidelines from the caretaker set-up about the implementation of the ongoing development schemes.
The caretaker chief minister, they said, had also discussed the matter with some senior bureaucrats who advised him not to interfere in the process because it would decelerate the development cycle and create problems for the government, whose primary task was to conduct the next general elections in a free and transparent manner.
They deduced that the government was likely to continue the implementation of the development projects initiated by the previous government.
This is what the caretaker chief minister Shamsul Mulk hinted at during his interaction with the provincial bureaucracy on Oct 20, said one of the participants while talking to Dawn.
