LAHORE, Nov 25 Speakers at the People's Budget Conference on Wednesday stressed the need for involving civil society, community groups and trade unions along with parliamentarians in budget formulation and utilisation.

The conference was organised by ActionAid and Women Workers Helpline.

MPA Amna Buttar said the Punjab government did not consider inclusion of recommendations of women MPs in the budget. She said budget-making had become a technical job as the terminology used in it could not be understood by common run of people.

She said most MPAs were not being consulted in the budget-making process and were provided copies of budget for debate only two days before the commencement of the session. They could not even go through the voluminous copies during two days, not to speak of expressing their views on it.

Pakistan Muslim League (Q) MPA Amna Ulfat said the Punjab government had failed to utilise Rs10 billion allocated for social sector during the last financial year because of a lack of capacity. It had not allocated even a penny for the development and welfare of women this year, she said.

ActionAid Senior Programme Officer Adam Malik said there was a need to engage civil society groups, trade unions and professional forums in consultative process for budget-making and utilisation under the supervision of parliamentary forums. Assembly standing committees should discuss sectoral budgets in January before submission to the finance department, he said.

He also underscored the need for checking under-utilisation of development budget and over-spending on account of non-development budget and administrative expenditure. He pointed out that one third of education budget, 50 per cent of environment budget and 50 per cent of regional uplift budget for South Punjab could not be utilised in Punjab last year.

Commenting on the Lahore district budget, Women Workers Helpline Secretary-General Bushra Khaliq said funds for school management committees had been reduced from Rs50,000 to Rs25,000 each. The government had decided to establish 10 mother and child healthcare centres during the last financial year, but had established none. It also failed to upgrade the Basic Health Unit.

Dr Bela Raza, Jamil Raza Jamil of Idara Farogh-i-Taleem-o-Aagahi, Hina Sheikh of SAHI, Salman Abid of Strengthening Participatory Organisation, Zulfiqar Ali of Hirrak Development Centre, Khalid Masood of Jaag Welfare Movement, Kirdar Siddiq of Awam Dost Foundation and Habib Joiya of Pakistan Welfare Society also expressed their views on budget formulation and utilisation procedures.