You may have heard the chatter that after the 27th Amendment the great tampering of the 

National Finance Commission (NFC) Award is once again underway.

The NFC, freshly constituted on Aug 22 with all the pomp and paperwork we have come to expect, still has not held its inaugural session. The Nov 18 date, much like our GDP projections, has quietly been revised downward to some undefined point in the future. And speaking of downward revisions, the growth forecast has nosedived by up to 

0.7 percentage points.

For years now, officials in the finance ministry and politicians of all parties, when they magically find themselves in Islamabad, have dreamed of trimming the provinces’ share. It would have happened already if not for that stubborn thing known as the 18th Amendment, which has a nasty habit of empowering provinces and irritating the centre. Were it not for the sensitivities of centre-province politics, especially the PPP’s long-standing defence of provincial autonomy, such revisions might have come sooner.

HW&SC claims transparency ensured in Chief IT Officer hiring

At the........

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