Centre, KP seem to be on ‘same page’ on NFC tweaks
For a change, the federal government led by the PML-N and the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government headed by the PTI seem to be in agreement on changes to the oversized population factor in determining the share of the federation and its federating units under the new National Finance Commission (NFC), set to hold its introductory meeting later this week. “We will demand that population and backwardness should be disincentivised for resource distribution among the provinces,” said KP Minister for Finance Muzammil Aslam while speaking at the first two-day ‘Prosper Pakistan’ conference organised by the FPCCI Regional Office Peshawar in collaboration with KP’s Board of Investment and Trade. The federal ministers, particularly development minister Ahsan Iqbal, had been publicly calling for disincentivising the population for NFC shares, although no political party in any province has ever called for the population to secure more funds from the divisible pool. However, the allegations of irregularities in the population census have cropped up in the past, which required improvement in census methodologies. The first meeting of the 11th NFC, constituted last week, has been scheduled for August 29 (Friday) to set the stage for subsequent deliberations.