The unfortunate chronicle of insufficient spending on less developed areas continues. First the government is criticised for allocating too little of the national budget to uplift far flung areas, and when it does impart with a certain amount of money, its lies there unspent. Members of Senate Functional Committee on Problems of Less Developed Areas came to discover that federal institutions have not utilised the funds allocated in Public Sector Development Programme (PSDP) 2015-16 for bringing the areas at par with developed areas.
These areas have no hope of becoming remotely comparable to developed areas as the lack of political will is apparent as day. Balochistan and FATA are the worst affected by the ignorance of the lawmakers and federal institutions functioning there. The Rs 1600 million allocated for the construction of 100 small dams in Balochistan lies untouched as the water table depletes to dangerous levels and no one is concerned with the bleak future of the people of Balochistan. The leaders of this country need an incident like Thar to wake them out of their reverie and prompt them to take action.
Gawadar, the city on which rests the future of CPEC and a prosperous Pakistan, does not even have a source of clean water for its residents. The scarcity of water in Gwadar has reached a dangerous level so much so that people have to pay Rs 12000 for a single water tanker. Out of the total Rs 25 billion allocated for FATA, only Rs 1.5 billion have so far been spent on the projects in the restive tribal areas. It is high time that the government starts to treat the people of Balochistan and Fata as equal citizens of this country. The disparity and the divide are becoming too wide to bridge and this must be rectified before it is too late.
http://nation.com.pk/editorials/10-Feb-2016/miserly-spending
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