• First meeting of 11th NFC scheduled for Friday
• PTI’s Muzammil Aslam says KP will seek disincentivising population, propose prosperity and forestation as criteria for resource distribution
• KP minister rues imbalance in Centre’s approach to smaller provinces

NATHIA GALI: 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.........

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