KARACHI, Sept 22: Leader of the opposition in the Sindh Assembly Nisar Ahmad Khuhro on Thursday condemned the regime’s attempt to give a constitutional cover to a horizontal distribution of the NFC Award.

Addressing a news conference, he alleged that the long-awaited negotiations on the Award had been revived by the government in an effort to appease people for a while as a new formula for a horizontal distribution was now under consideration.

Mr Khuhro condemned the government’s ‘tactics’ alleging that it was trying to bring yet another constitutional amendment through this proposal. Through such an amendment, he said, the regime would actually restrict the distribution among provinces to 50 per cent which, at the moment, was not a constitutional requirement.

He criticized the regime for its failure in announcing a new NFC Award as yet while the people of Sindh had been suffering for long because of the 1997 Award that had been approved by a caretaker government.

Talking about the issue of water, the opposition leader demanded that the report submitted by Mr Abbasi be made public and it should not be treated like a secret document.

Shazia Marri, a PPP-P spokesperson on finance, stated that according to the recently proposed formula for horizontal distribution, 90 per cent of distribution would be based on population and only 10 per cent on other factors, i.e. revenue collection, inverse population density and poverty.

The new formula, as reported, stipulated a share of Punjab 52.25 per cent, Sindh 24 per cent, NWFP 15 per cent and Balochistan 8.75 per cent whereas it previously was 57.32 per cent, 23.68 per cent, 13.68 per cent and 5.14 per cent respectively.

This year, the divisible pool was approximately Rs240 billion. She also gave a break-up of the distribution as per the old and new formula and the absolute and percentage increase and decrease in this context.

This meant, she pointed out, that Sindh would gain a mere Rs760 million. “And for this, the Sindh government had wasted nearly three years,” she remarked.

She described the new formula as ‘eyewash’ whereby the Sindh government would claim that it had been able to achieve a multi-factor formula. In reality, the new formula would do nothing to provide relief to Sindh from its financial woes.

Ms Marri stated that another attempt to limit the share of the provinces in the NFC Award was to include a fixed percentage in the constitution through the proposed amendment. It talks about devolving 26 of the 33 items on the concurrent list to the provinces and also restricting the provinces’ share in the divisible pool to 50 per cent.

“This is not very clear because if the 26 items on the concurrent list are transferred to provinces, then their share should be much more than 50 per cent. We were talking about a slab between 47.5 and 50 per cent with the existing arrangement. If the Centre lets go the food & agriculture, health, education, sports & culture, housing & works, information & broadcasting, narcotics control, tourism & religious affairs, etc., entirely to provinces, then there should be no reason for it to keep 50 per cent of the divisible pool,” she said.

She suggested that the revenues kept by the Centre outside the divisible pool also be calculated.

She said that this was a clear shot at the possibility of demand by provinces of an increase in their share, as they would be bound through the constitution not to make such a demand. They could also never expect or receive 80 per cent share like in the past, she added.