THE policy statement of the government’s recently launched Ehsaas programme states that provinces will be “encouraged to improve the [National Finance Commission’s] allocation formula to achieve our common goal of making opportunities equal for all Pakistani citizens, irrespective of where they live”.

Historically, state-led development had increased employment opportunities in some districts and areas but not all. In late 19th-century India, the Bri­tish while aiming at revenue generation and exporting primary raw material from India to England, decided to increase India’s agricultural production.

Canals were constructed to irrigate and cultivate Punjab’s barren but fit-for-agriculture land. Farming and residential plots were allotted at throwaway prices, to carefully selected agriculturists from the settled districts of India. These measures together came to be known as ‘canal colonisation’.

The canal colonisation of Punjab led to migration to ‘canal colonies’ at a massive scale and caused the irrigated area in (United) Punjab to increase from three million acres in 1885 to 14m acres in 1947 — an increase of 366 per cent. Ali Imran writes in Punjab Under Imperialism: 1885-1947 that (Central) Punjab which was a desert waste or at best a pastoral savannah turned into one of the major centres of commercialised agriculture in South Asia.

The principle of equity demands that development efforts of the state be spread all over the country.

The increase in employment opportunities in central Punjab was the obvious outcome of canal colonisation, where eight out of the nine canal colonies developed by the Raj were located. Moreover, thanks to migration the population of Punjab also increased rapidly. For example, the population density of Lyallpur (now Faisalabad) increased from seven persons per square mile in 1891 to 301 in 1921 and 927 in 1998. The ginning factories, the Agricul­ture Research Centre and the railway workshop in Lyallpur all owe their origin to the lower Chenab colony that facilitated cotton-cropping in the region.

Yet another initiative of the then state that led to significant employment opportunities and migration was the establishment of the military headquarters of the Indian army in Rawalpindi. After the Afghan war of 1878, the British became obsessed with the Great Game and feared that Russia may invade India through Afghanistan. To deter the Russian threat, they decided to establish the military headquarters of the Indian army in Rawalpindi as it was close enough to the full range of passes and yet too far away to be overrun in the first offensive.

The establishment of the headquarters turned the villages of Rawal into the city of Rawalpindi — the second largest in Punjab, next to Lahore. Moreover, out of a total of six cantonments in Punjab, four were located in the relatively small northern Punjab comprising, Rawalpindi/Murree, Jhelum and Attock.

Cantonments had influenced the region’s economy in a number of ways. Meant to serve as residential-cum-office spaces for the British officers, the provision of public goods was bound to be better in the cantonments than in the inner city. The strategic road-and-rail network constructed to connect cantonments was also used for commercial carriage and civilian transport. Similarly, the health and education infrastructure meant for soldiers was allowed to be used by civilians as well and the construction within and around cantonments generated innumerable job opportunities. Hence, migration to Rawalpindi and the increase in population in and around cantonments would not have been a surprise.

As there was no NFC kind of an institution in the colonial period, the state could choose on its own where to spend and how much. It is obvious that canal colonisation as well as the establishment of military headquarters and cantonments involved massive expenditures — that more was spent in Punjab meant that less was available for spending elsewhere.

The NFC distributes a major proportion (82 per cent) of national tax revenue on the basis of the provincial share of the population, and Punjab being the most populated province draws the largest share. The increase in population in the province being sudden and owing to the development-cum-strategic ventures undertaken in the pre-Partition period, Punjab continues to be the beneficiary of the pre-Partition state-led development effort, by way of the current, larger allocations under the NFC.

The development effort undertaken during the British reign, though beneficial for the country, was meant to serve the interest of the Raj — an independent state has to think differently. The principle of equity demands that development efforts of the state be spread all over the country so as to impact the majority, if not everyone.

People living in districts like Tharparkar do not enjoy the same opportunities as those residing in Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad do. To provide a reasonable level of opportunities to the majority, development efforts, especially in the social sector will have to be focused on the lagged regions of Pakistan.

A formula that distributes funds to the provinces primarily on the basis of population share cannot ensure that enough funds will flow to, say, Chagai, Rajanpur, Kohistan, Tharparkar, former Fata and Gilgit-Baltistan. To provide opportunities for all, the ‘share of the population’ in the NFC’s distribution formula, will have to be reduced drastically in favour of socioeconomic indicators like multidimensional poverty that accounts for the state of healthcare and education, etc, in a region.

It is time that the nation paid attention to focusing development efforts on such regions. But the current needs of the provinces have to be met as well. A pragmatic solution could be to estimate the expenditures required to sustain the existing provincial infrastructure and the administrative paraphernalia. The balance of funds may be distributed based on the socioeconomic indicators of the districts within a province and such grants may be conditioned upon the use in the backward regions.

Lagged regions like the tribal areas lack economic opportunities and have been safe havens for terrorists; once the nation sees the correlation between the two it will not be difficult to find the money to spend on it.

The writer is dean, Air University School of Management, and is associated with the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics, Islamabad.

Published in Dawn, April 29th, 2019