Khyber Pakhtunkhwa to take ministers, MPs into confidence on budget

Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Minister for Finance, Engineer Mohammad Humayun Khan has said that all provincial ministers and members of the provincial assembly would be taken into confidence before finalisation of the budge 2011-12. He expressed these views while chairing a meeting on the budget for financial year 2011-12 here in the Conference Room of the Department of Finance on Wednesday.
The Provincial Minister for Education Sardar Hussein Khan Babak, Secretary Finance Sahibzada Saeed Ahmad, Secretary Education Mohammad Arifeen Khan, Additional Secretary Finance Nadeem Bashir and other officers of the education and finance departments attended the meeting.
The provincial minister said that a broad-based policy would be framed with an aim to provide benefit to the common man. The minister directed the resolution of the certain problems of the education department ensuring provision of more academic facilities to the people especially in the remote hilly parts of the province. He directed all the line departments to work generously for mobilisation of resources, curtail non-developmental expenditures and follow the mechanism of the finance department in the utilisation of public exchequer keeping in view the interests of the people of the province above all.
The minister finance urged the line departments to remove observations of the finance department as early as possible so that their new schemes could be worked out in time.
He said the province was going through hard crisis and it was need of the hour to spend public money cautiously by the officers of the departments avoiding unnecessary expenditures and to create more income generating projects so that the expected shortfalls in the coming budget could be tackled with constructive trends.
The minister for finance said that the devastated floods of the last year bulk of annual development programme (ADP) funds were utilised on the rehabilitation process as well as flood protection activities. He said, he wanted to provide relief to the needy people and that could only be possible when all the line departments extended co-ordination to the finance department in the sanctioning process of budgetary allocations.
He also directed for quick monitoring of the funds utilisation process and to ensure that the purpose for which funds were given be achieved. Shortage of teachers and other facilities in the schools were also reviewed and decisions taken for the larger interest of the masses. The budgetary meetings will continue daily and matters of all the departments would be given final shape before draft budget is prepared.