ISLAMABAD: The provinces on Tuesday threatened to seek intervention of the Supreme Court if the Centre does not take steps for early finalisation of the National Finance Commission (NFC) award.

The 7th NFC award expired at the close of financial year 2014-15 and has since been on extension through presidential ordinance.

After presiding over a meeting of technical NFC members from the provinces, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Finance Minister Muzaffar Said told journalists that the provinces had decided to write a letter to the prime minister to take immediate result-oriented steps for the next NFC award before formally going to the apex court. He said the provinces agreed that if the federal government was ready to take result-oriented steps, the provinces would unanimously request the prime minister to play his role or they would approach the Supreme Court.

The meeting was attended by Sindh’s private member on NFC Senator Saleem Mandviwala, Punjab Finance Secretary Saifullah Dogar and KP’s member on NFC Professor Ibrahim.

The KP finance minister said the participants urged the government to urgently convene a meeting of the commission to finalise their recommendations for the next award. “We have already written a letter to the president for finalisation of the 8th NFC award and now we have decided to write a letter to the prime minister to resolve the issue.”

Mr Said recalled that it was agreed by Finance Minister Ishaq Dar in December last year that a meeting of the 9th NFC would be held in January this year, but no such meeting had been convened so far. He alleged that the federal finance minister was using delaying tactics by holding the provinces responsible for the delay. Mr Dar, he said, had tried to misguide parliament in his budget speech when he stated that the federal government wanted to allocate seven per cent of the gross consolidated receipts for the National Security Fund and development of special areas such as Fata, AJK and Gilgit-Baltistan, but the provinces were not ready.

“During a meeting on NFC award, held in December, we had asked the finance minister to provide details about the 7pc allocation for security and special areas development, but no details have been provided so far,” he said.

Published in Dawn, September 20th, 2017