Two issues critical for harmony amongst the constituent units of the federation and between the provinces and the Centre continue to hang fire. Despite the March 31 deadline, no consensus could be hammered out at the National Finance Commission (NFC) Award meeting in Quetta.
Now the next meeting is planned in Islamabad without a date being set. However, informally it is being recognised by the participants that April 15 represents a cut-off date as soon after that the Centre and the provinces will engage in their budget making exercise for the new financial year.
If no agreement is available by then, the hope expressed by Prime Minister Zafarullah Jamali in a meeting with Federal Finance Minister Shaukat Aziz the other day that the budgets would be made under the new Award may not materialise.
The issues bedevilling the Award remain the basis for the distribution of resources amongst the provinces, as well as the relative shares of the Centre and the provinces as a whole.
The latter issue continues to revolve around the insistence of the Centre that only 46 percent will be available for the provinces, which includes the Rs 36.5 billion to be collected this year as the 2.5 percent GST share for them, a resource that was supposed to be outside the divisible pool and meant to compensate the provinces for the abolished octroi and the zilla tax.
The three smaller provinces too do seem to be able to persuade Punjab to give up its insistence on population as the sole basis for the inter-provincial distribution.
The federal government has failed in its duty in this respect to act as an impartial arbitrator and allowed the confusion and dissension amongst the provinces to remain intact.
It is increasingly being felt that this discord amongst the provinces suits the federal government in so far as its ability to get the provinces to accept less than 50 percent share of the divisible pool for inter-provincial distribution is concerned. If so, this may be an expedient strategy for bargaining but with very short-term gains.
The other issue of importance, with implications for national solidarity and inter-provincial harmony, is the water distribution system.
President General Pervez Musharraf has issued a directive in a meeting the other day concerning the power sector to initiate at least one major dam, either Kalabagh or Bhasha, by December 31, 2004.
This, however, is most intriguing. When the parliamentary committee set up to resolve the issue is not likely to finalise its report before June 30, and the technical committee on water resources has been given an extension to report by February 2005, how then will it be possible to implement the President's directive?
It is rumoured that if consensus escapes the stakeholders on both the NFC Award and the water issue, the President may intervene and using his overwhelming authority, impose solutions on all and sundry.
This course may 'resolve' these issues for the moment, but ownership of the decisions taken in this manner will not be from the heart, and in fact will leave enormous heart-burns that will not only generate but also intensify the controversies in the years to come.
The dangers to national and inter-provincial harmony, if these two critical matters are not settled by consensus, are so great that no responsible government can even contemplate ignoring them.
Cynics, that we have aplenty amongst us, are of the firm view that the state of disharmony that exists today is, by and large, due to the belief that the our federal governments have failed or refused to act as a neutral umpire in disputes between the federating units.
Given the dissension, the federal government should revise its role and try to act as an impartial arbitrator in the interests of the federation as a whole.
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