PESHAWAR: The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government will present over Rs505 billion budget for the year 2016-17 at the provincial assembly on Tuesday (today).

Provincial Minister for Finance Muzaffar Said will present the budget during the assembly session, which will start at around 4pm. The budgetary proposals will be placed before the provincial cabinet to get its approval. The cabinet meeting is scheduled to take place at 11am on Tuesday at Civil Secretariat’s cabinet room.

Officials in the planning and development department told Dawn that total outlay of the budget was over Rs505 billion. They said that the volume of the provincial Annual Development Programme (ADP) would be Rs161 billion.

The current expenditures are estimated to be around Rs344 billion of which provincial ADP will be Rs125 billion while Rs36 billion would come through foreign assistance.

Officials say volume of ADP will be Rs161bn

An official said that the province’s own share in the ADP financing would be about Rs113 billion and the remaining Rs12 billion would be generated through borrowing.

“Finance department from the very beginning was adamant on pitching realistic figures, which would turn out to be hard to realise like that of the ongoing year,” the official said, adding that province’s own ADP was pitched within the ceiling of Rs113 billion laid out by the finance department.

The official said that of Rs113 billion, a portion financed by the provincial government, Rs80 billion would be earmarked for the provincial ADP while Rs33.9 were allocated to the district governments across the province. The ADP comprises a total of 1,515 new and ongoing schemes in 34 sectors.

The official said that the ADP included setting up of about 200 smart schools, fully equipped district and tehsil headquarters hospitals, refurbishing of higher secondary schools, construction of Swat Expressway, agricultural uplift and integrated tourism programmes.

The ADP was revised several times during the past one month. Earlier planning and development department prepared several projections of the development programme, however, Chief Minister Pervez Khattak started review meetings with each department to finalise the ADP.

An official told Dawn that the ADP was finalised on Saturday last after several painstakingly long meetings, some of which lasted till midnight.

The official said that preparation of ADP was delayed owing to cash problem of the provincial government. Earlier this year provincial government had to cut its ADP twice and bring it to Rs113 billion from initial projection of Rs142 billion, he added.

The reason behind the slashing the ADP was unrealistically high budgetary projections proposed by the finance department, which it failed to achieve.

The finance department in its budget strategy paper-II had projected a limited fiscal space due to province’s resource constraints and proposed to keep the development budget at Rs75 billion with Rs29.829 billion local component, Rs12.811 billion district component and Rs32.884 billion foreign funded development projects.

According to finance department, it has arranged to upload the budget documents on its website soon after start of the budget speech at the provincial assembly.

A statement issued here said that the documents would include budget speech, white paper and Finance Bill 2016-17. These documents will be subsequently uploaded on website of information department as well.

Published in Dawn, June 14th, 2016