Devolution process: National Assembly panel summons provinces to discuss their concerns

The National Assembly's Standing Committee on Inter-provincial Co-ordination on Monday summoned provinces to discuss their concerns on the devolution process on January 19, as the panel was told that activities of five ministries would be devolved to the provinces by end of the current month/early February this year.
The committee, which met with Mir Ahmedan Khan Bugti in the chair at the Parliament House, was briefed on the implementation of the 18th constitutional amendment and Aghaz-e-Huqooq-e-Balochistan Package by officials of the Ministry of Inter-Provincial Co-ordination and Establishment Division.
Briefing the committee on the 18th constitutional amendment, secretary Ministry for Inter-Provincial Co-ordination Ahmed Mehmood Zahid said after completion of the first phase of the devolution process, the Commission on the Implementation of 18th Constitutional Amendment now plans to devolve activities of five ministries to the provinces by end of the current month and early February this year in its second phase.
These ministries include Education, Social Welfare & Special Education, Tourism, Livestock & Dairy Development and culture. The committee was further told that the commission was also considering five more ministries of which some functions would be devolved to the provinces.
These ministries include Finance, Revenue Division, Ports & Shipping, Interior and Law Justice & Parliamentary Affairs. It was revealed that the implementation commission was making utmost efforts to complete the process of devolution by June 30, 2011, the time frame given in the Constitution.
The committee was informed that the 18th amendment has strengthened and introduced the concept of participatory management both by the federation and the federating units through strengthening the Council of Common Interests (CCI), which has now a greater role to play, as the matters pertaining to very important subjects have been added to part-II of the federal legislative list.
The secretary said that now the government would not allow circumventing or misconstruing the provisions of the Constitution, in particular those pertaining to provincial autonomy and federal-provincial relations. He mentioned that the concurrent list in the Constitution had 47 items on which both Parliament and provincial assemblies could legislate and citied article 142 (c) that provides that a provincial assembly shall and Majlis-e-Shoora (Parliament) shall not have power to make laws with respect to any matter not enumerated in the federal legislative list.
Now Parliament can only legislate on items listed in part-I and part-II of the federal legislative list and consequently thereof a large number of subjects or activities previously being handled by the federal ministries/divisions would now be handled exclusively by the provincial government, he added.
Some members of the committee raised concerns over the issue of uniformed curriculum, as according to them the curriculum should be uniform across the country. However, the secretary said that as the Ministry for Education has been devolved to the provinces under the 18th constitutional amendment now the subject comes in the authority of the federating units.
He further said that the issue has also been raised by the Minister for Education and it could only be resolved through new legislation. He further said that there was need to trust the provinces and there was nothing in the concurrent list, which could not be done by the provinces. Deputy Secretary, Establishment Division Aziz Jamali briefed the committee on Aghaz-e-Huqooq-e-Balochistan Package saying that only 15 out of the 161 proposals have been fully implemented so far. He said that 12 proposals were in advance stages while 34 were in various stages of implementation.
He informed that under the package, the federal government announced 5,000 jobs for Baloch youth in the Education Department, against which 4,786 letters of successful candidates have been issued in BPS 14 and 16. He added that all these posts were fully funded by the federal government for the next four years and for the purpose the Center would pay Rs 10 billion annually to Balochistan government.
The committee also expressed dissatisfaction over the pace of implementation on the package with the observation that a lot had been done on paper and nothing on the ground. The committee, however, summoned chief secretaries of four provinces on January 19 to discuss both the issues of devolution of the various ministries to the provinces as well as their concerns and the pending work on the implementation of the Aghaz-e-Huqooq-e-Balochistan Package.