Daily Times

The budget of Punjab, year after year, presents blown-up figures of development allocations while the actual spending falls way short of the figures shown in the budget papers. In order to divert funds to ostentatious, politically-motivated programmes, such as the Metro bus and the laptop scheme, the government has deprived social development projects. No wonder, the Punjab’s growth rate during the past five years has been an average of two and a half percent, even less than the average growth rate of three percent in the country.

The allocations for development programmes propagated at the time of passing the budget and actual expenditure reflects a consistent pattern of obfuscating the real fiscal picture from the public. For example, according to the official statistics, the budget 2010-11 allocated Rs 182 billion for the annual development plan, but the government actually spent only Rs 94 billion. In 2011-12, the total development outlay was Rs 188 billion, but only Rs 136 billion were spent. In 2012-13, the actual development expenditures were Rs 160 billion against the original allocation of Rs 250 billion in the budget documents. For the coming fiscal year (2013-14), the provincial government has presented a fanciful amount of Rs 290 billion for development programmes, but insiders say the government does not have more than Rs 170 billion at its disposal for this purpose. The objective is to draw applause in media at the time of the budget’s presentation, while the actual reality remains hidden in official files.

The provincial government has invented some novel terminology to hide the real intention of the budget document. One such term is ‘non-core allocations’ in the annual development plan, which actually represents that portion of the allocation for which the financial resources are not available to the government from day one, but for the sake of publicity, development schemes are mentioned under this head. Another term is ‘below-the-line’ expenditures whose details are not mentioned in the budget document at all. This block allocation remains at the disposal and discretion of the chief minister. In 2012-13, a whopping amount of Rs 20 billion was spent by Punjab’s chief minister under this head and an even higher amount of Rs 50 billion has been allocated for the next year. This huge amount is spent on the schemes started either at the whims of the chief minister or to please the members of the assembly, though the government boasts of doing away with the notorious development funds for the legislators.

Education and health, in particular, are the most neglected areas of Punjab’s development. The high-ups pay lip service to education’s development, but the reality on the ground is quite different. The Punjab rulers are obsessed with ostentatious civil works such as building roads, flyovers and underpasses, diverting funds from the already backward social sector. Whenever the provincial government launched some project for political gains, such as Lahore’s Metro bus or a flyover or an underpass, an axe fell on the social sector’s development.

In 2010-11, the Punjab government announced an allocation of Rs 69.7 billion for social development, but actually spent only Rs 27.8 billion by the end of the fiscal year. In 2011-12, the government’s spending on social sector was Rs 50.5 billion against an original allocation of Rs 73.2 billion. In 2012-13, the spending was not more than Rs 40 billion against the allocation of Rs 86.5 billion. This is despite the fact that it receives in budgetary support soft loans from the World Bank and grants from DFID for investing in the social development. The trick is to delay the issuance of cash to social projects so that they could not be started on time, and thus they utilise the minimum possible amount. The government indulges in this practice with impunity year after year.

Behind the veneer of the much-publicised Danish schools and free laptops, education has been the biggest loser during the last five years. According to official statistics, in 2010-11, the provincial government spent only Rs 6.6 billion on education programmes in contrast to Rs 46 billion on the infrastructure. In 2011-12, education development received only Rs 19.9 billion as against Rs 55.6 billion on infrastructure. In 2012-13, the education sector’s development was provided with only Rs 12 billion.

Ignoring the real needs of the education sector, the government opted for media hype by distributing free laptops among university students at a time when more than 40,000 posts of teachers in government schools have been lying vacant across the province for the past many years. This year, the government has announced to enhance the enrolment in public schools by one million in a year, but has not allocated required funds for the infrastructure, such as building of additional classrooms needed for this purpose.

The provincial government’s neglect and indifference to healthcare is reflected in the poor condition of public hospitals and dispensaries all over the province. This year alone more than 200 children have died owing to the measles outbreak in Punjab, which is an outcome of poor investment in the public immunisation programme during the last five years. In the current budget, the Punjab government did not create posts of staff at teaching hospitals and district and tehsil level hospitals despite the fact that these institutions were facing a shortage of teaching staff. A prime institution like King Edward Medical University, Lahore has made demonstrators the head of many departments instead of appointing teaching staff. The current budget has allocated too little funds to improve the existing healthcare facilities in small towns and rural areas, which are supposed to address the needs of over 70 percent of the population.

In 2010-11, the actual expenditure on the health sector’s development (Rs5.8 billion) was just 34.5 percent of the allocated amount; in 2011-12, it was 49.6 percent (Rs 8.1 billion) and in the outgoing year it was around 60 percent (Rs12 billion) of the original allocation. For the next fiscal year 2013-14, the Punjab has allocated a paltry amount of 18.3 billion rupees for health projects and even that allocation would not be fully spent keeping in view the past record.

The outcome of neglecting the social sector is manifest in social development indicators of the province. The Punjab Bureau of Statistics had conducted its latest Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS-2011) with the assistance of UNDP and UNICEF before the government of Shahbaz Sharif completed its five-year tenure early this year, but it was not released until the May 11 elections were over. The purpose was to hide the dismal picture of social development in the province and to save the outgoing PML-N government from embarrassment. According to the MICS, the infant mortality rate in the province is 82 children per 1,000 while the under-five infant mortality rate is 104. Only 13.9 percent of the population has access to piped drinking water and improved sanitation is available to only 62.7 percent. As low as 16.6 percent women go to a public sector health facility for delivery while 36.9 percent go to private facilities. Only 59.4 percent children (aged five to nine) attend primary or secondary schools. These figures in the MICS report, which was never officially released, speak volumes about social development in the province.

In these circumstances, when the real needs of the province are being sacrificed at the altar of political expediency, civil society needs to play its role to make the Punjab rulers re-order their priorities. The spread of measles in Punjab in recent months is just a reflection of what is intrinsically wrong in the province, but has drawn little attention.

The writer is a freelance journalist