BALOCHISTAN’S chief minister, Mir Abdul Qudoos Bizenjo, knows exactly how to keep the fickle-minded legislators happy to ensure their unflinching loyalty. The budget for the next financial year proposed by his government last Monday is proof of his political acumen. It isn’t that the province’s politics is free from ‘outside’ influences or that the members of the assembly get a free hand in electing the leader of the House, yet the support of his ‘happy’ party colleagues and allies can be an asset for him in his fight against other contenders for the top job. No wonder his government, with its eyes on the new elections expected to be held in October, has given a fiscally expansionary budget of Rs750.5bn that contains a huge development programme of Rs313.3bn for the distribution of funds among the legislators. Many bureaucrats who have served in Balochistan describe the province as a large ‘burial ground’ for development schemes. Next year’s development plan proposing the launch of nearly 5,100 new schemes is only going to extend the boundaries of that graveyard.

The budget also contains several populist measures to please voters, such as the creation of 4,389 government jobs for youth, laptops and scholarships for students, funding for health cards, elevation of district headquarters hospitals to teaching hospitals, upgradation of teaching posts, subsidies for farmers on bulldozers, tractors and seeds, and the provision of subsidised wheat flour and interest-free loans for wheat purchases. Besides, it has generously cut 43 provincial taxes on hotels, and health and education services, to win over small businesses. This is in spite of the severe resource crunch that saw the government cut its development funding by a third to Rs127.6bn in the outgoing year. All these election-related measures are billed to increase non-development expenditure next year, putting more pressure on Balochistan’s scarce resources. The crunch the province is facing doesn’t allow this extravagance. But politics has its own demands.

Published in Dawn, June 24th, 2023