PESHAWAR: The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) tribal districts have been suffering from slow pace development pace for four consecutive years due to financial crisis and tussle between the Federal and Provincial governments.
At the time of merger, the federal government had committed to spend Rs1,000 billion on the development of tribal districts in 10 years or Rs100 billion every year. After the merger in 2018, the current financial year has been the worst in terms of development projects as only 11% of development funds could be spent so far, most of which were spent on employees’ salaries, offices and fuel expenditures.
After the merger of tribal districts with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, every year funds were allocated for tribal districts in the form of development funds but were never fully utilised. In the financial year 2019-20, Rs55.90bn were spent in the tribal districts. Similarly, Rs40.20bn were spent in 2020-21, in 2021-22 Rs47.30bn were spent while in the current financial, only Rs11.8bn could be utilized so far.
According to the sources, this year, the rate of spending of funds will be extremely low.
Due to the political tussle between PDM and PTI, funds release to the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa was stopped by the federal government, which badly affected the development program in tribal districts.
