PESHAWAR, June 2: The NWFP cabinet has authorised Chief Minister Akram Khan Durrani to utilise money from the MPAs discretionary funds on uplift projects anywhere in the province.

The decision, which is likely to cause a hue and cry by legislators in the forthcoming budget-session commencing on June 18, was taken at the last provincial cabinet meeting, sources told Dawn on Saturday.

The MMA government had been allocating Rs100 million to each MPA for development schemes located within their respective constituencies under the Tameer-i-Sarhad Programme (TSP) for the last two years. Before financial year 2004-05, this allocation was Rs50 million for each MPA.

The provincial cabinet supported the spending of TSP funds at the chief minister’s discretion and directed the concerned quarters to amend rules for materialising the decision, sources said.

The chief minister will most probably get control over the development fund by the next financial year since the revision of rules usually takes some time, sources in the finance department said.

In addition to the proposed move, the chief minister already has discretion over 10 per cent of the development funds allocated for district governments through the Provincial Finance Commission (PFC) award, sources said.

An amount of Rs96.3 million was allocated out of Rs963.39 million of the total development funds for the district governments under the PFC.

Interestingly, the utilisation of discretionary funds had been far better than those put at the disposal of the district governments and Tehsil Municipal Administrations (TMAs).

By the end of the current financial year’s third quarter, the total utilisation against such discretionary funds remained at 57.8 per cent, whereas the spending by the district governments and TMAs was not more than 10 per cent of the total allocation, the sources added.

Giving reasons for the decision of putting more development funds at the chief minister’s discretion, a senior official said that the slow pace of fund utilisation as well as complaints of overlapping and misuse of funds had prompted the government to take such a decision.

The utilisation of funds on projects financed through the TSP had been extremely slow, which could be gauged from the nine month performance of the implementing agencies, the official said.The finance department had released an amount of Rs239.262 million against Rs1240 million allocated for the TSP component of the Annual Development Programme (ADP), sources said.