Extravagance of discretionary spending

World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and independent economists have repeatedly warned the federal government to review its policy of acquiring costly commercial loans and reckless discretionary spending. But the PML- N government has doled out Rs 54 billion to parliamentarians in the garb of development funds during the past six months alone, taking the total discretionary spending to a whopping amount of Rs.130 billion.

Documents of Planning and Development Ministry show that more than 90 percent of the development funds were given to the members of National Assembly from Punjab which will be the main battlefield to win majority of the seats of the lower house from this province in the next general elections. More than half of 272 directly contested National Assembly seats are from Punjab. A cursory look on the spending of the so called development funds from 1985transpire that bulk of such financial resources are not spent on development projects and are misappropriated. This recipe of appeasement of and exercising control over the member parliament was introduced by the Muhammad Khan Junejo government as a necessary evil because of the party less pools in 1985. It was nothing but a political bribe to hold the lawmakers under the umbrella of the sitting government. When his government was dismissed by the President General Ziaul Haq on 29th May, 1988 the unutilized funds of the members of parliament in their personal ledger accounts were not properly accounted for by way of post audit.Party discipline is abnormally tight by virtue of certain provisions of 18th amendment to the constitution, then why the ruling PML-N government is pursuing the extravagance of discretionary spendings.

The economy is in a precarious condition because of acute stagnation in the agriculture and manufacturing sectors. Exports have declined by more than $ 5 billion and imports have gone up sharply pushing up the current account deficit to $ 12 billion. To shore up the fast decline in foreign exchange reserves because of massive payments of external debt and foreign trade liabilities more expensive commercial loans are being acquired by floating $ 2.5 billion Euro and Sukuk Bonds in the European and American Markets.  Depreciation of Rupee by five percent against UD dollar has added an additional debt burden of Rs. 700 billion piling up the total Public Debt to Rs 28 thousand billion. The amount of foreign debt has reached to $ 90 billion and it may go up to $ 100 billion by the end current fiscal year. The IMF and World Bank have made any financial bail out package conditional with the legislation of Public Finance Management Bill as the both the previous and present governments have violated the borrowing limits set out in the Fiscal Responsibility and Debt Limitation Act 2005 by manipulating the  lacunae of this act. That is why the international donor agencies have advised a fool proof legislation ensuring the much needed austerity in public spending. But the federal and provincial government of Punjab is not willing to take the sane advice of international lending organizations and independent economists to resort to austerity in public expenditure and stop the slide of the economy to the point of no return. Pakistan is ranked 147th in the 190 economies of the world. Hence, it can no longer afford the extravagance of doling out huge amount of funds to the members of parliament as an instrument of pre-poll rigging.