A RECENT World Bank report has looked into the NFC Award post-18th Amendment and provided some interesting details. For instance, it has shown how the bulk of the money seems to have gone into expanding local bureaucracies in health and education. It notes that 80 per cent of provincial spending is recurrent spending (a fancy way of saying it goes towards salaries and similar expenditures). It also argues that higher spending hasn’t improved health and education indicators all that much. Among other issues, the report has pointed out the provinces’ failure to shape rules for the fair and institutionalised distribution of funds to the local level. Even where the rules are clear or formalised, fund distribution remains patchy and is dependent on the provincial government’s largesse.

In fact, the report points out that spending at the local government level had fallen from 10pc in 2005 to 5pc by 2011; it has remained stuck at this number. For the sake of contrast, India spends 12pc at the LG level, Nepal 24pc and China 74pc. In other words, regardless of when LGs were introduced in the provinces and whether or not elections were held regularly, they have remained limited financially. It seems as if the provinces which have jealously guarded their own share of the NFC from the centre have also protected it equally passionately from the local level.

The report mentions that because devolution did not expand further, the 18th Amendment has made the financial burden at the federal level........

© Dawn