PESHAWAR, July 18: Chief Minister Akram Khan Durrani’s instructions to the Peshawar City District Government for allocating more financial resources to the town administrations of the city district have not been implemented in full, officials told Dawn.
In November last year, the chief minister had issued directives to the city district government to enhance the amount of funds released to the four town municipal administrations of the city district from the local fund to enable them to overcome their financial problems.
However, according to the officials, the city district government has yet to implement the chief minister’s directives in letter and spirit.
“The chief minister had agreed to a proposal by the Local Government and Rural Development Department, NWFP, envisaging that the district government allocate funds for its development activities only after releasing money to the town administrations to meet their development and non-development expenditure requirements,” said a senior official.
Town-1 Nazim Shaukat Ali said the chief minister had directed the district government to release Rs91.6 million as operational grant to the Town-1. Against that, he added, the district government had projected an amount of slightly over Rs40 million as operational grant, to be provided to the Town-1 during the 2006-07 financial year.
He accused the district government of “keeping larger piece of cake” with it as a result of which, the Town-1 was experiencing a severe financial crunch.
“Town-1 consists of 80 per cent of the Peshawar city district area but the resources being made available to us are not sufficient for the town administration to effectively take care of municipal services, carry out development activities and meet establishment cost,” said the nazim.
However, Capt (retd) Jehanzeb, District Coordination Officer of the Peshawar City District, held the Town-1 administration responsible for its financial woes.
“They have not developed any strategy to curtail their non-developmental expenditure on account of electricity, salaries etc to overcome their financial crisis,” said the DCO.
Instead of devising strategies to save public money and improve their service delivery system by adopting dynamic approach, he added, the Town-1 always asked the district government to provide greater funds.
Another official of the district government said: “They have to find a solution to their financial problems on their own as the district government has to cope with its own peculiar monetary problems.”
Officials of the Town-1 said that the incumbent administration’s financial difficulties had been compounded by huge amount of backlog left behind by the last administration, which left the office in June 2005 after completing four-year term.
The new administration had paid Rs12.5 million as post-retirement monetary benefits to the employees reaching the age of retirement during the days of the last administration, they said.