THE liquidation of the KP Assembly is an event rooted in economic, more specifically fiscal, constraints. For the time being, it is unlikely that the trajectory will continue to the other provinces, but it is worth keeping an eye on the resource envelope available to the state as the primary fount of this event.

Here is how it works. Every time the state is faced with a major demand for resources, usually for security-related matters, financial managers point to the NFC Award as the reason why that demand cannot be met. In the middle of the 2010s, for example, the then PML-N government faced a major demand for resources to pay for the military operations underway in the wake of the Army Public School massacre by the TTP. The then finance minister Ishaq Dar had said, in December 2016 for instance, that the government had to spend over Rs300 billion on the security operations since they began. He proposed a cut of seven per cent from the Federal Divisible Pool before provincial shares were calculated, in order to meet the expenses going forward.

The next year, Miftah Ismail, the then special assistant to the prime minister on finance, again pointed to the NFC Award and provincial expenditures as the reason why the federal government had to run such a large budget deficit and why demands for releases from the development budget might have to wait. That was in October 2017, when Dar was no longer finance minister. In 2019, prime minister Imran Khan told a rally in Ghotki that the 18th Amendment had........

© Dawn