Speakers call for transparency in budget making process

The government must prepare a draft budget that should be circulated among masses for discussion to make it people-centric as the process instead of giving consideration to the basic issues of people had helped concentrating wealth amongst a handful of people.
The budget making process had done no good to the poor and was seen as a tool being used to help concentrating wealth among privileged class. This practice has to be shunned and rich have to pay taxes.
This was the gist of discussion on 'People's Charter on Budget' document prepared by a non-governmental organisation, ActionAid for seeking broader sharing and feedback on budget to bring about economic change among the masses.
But the participants expressed deep concern over lack of transparency and said no substantial economic change could be brought about in the presence of huge spending on defence, retiring foreign debt, unnecessary administrative expenses, which could not be questioned or discussed at any forum.
The budget making process was seen as highly non-transparent because it was not being done in accordance with the legal requirements such as consulting the stakeholders, publication of taxation proposals and participation and feedback of councils. This makes the whole process misrepresenting in terms of budget priorities and future plans as well as adding to increased indifferences, resulting in malfunctioning of units in the development process.
The charter of demands underlined the need that governments should make the budget process inclusive in such a manner that parliamentarians, legislators, political parties (both government and opposition) should be involved and given ample time to review and give their feedback on the budget from all angles.
The priority areas in all sectors such as education, public sector development programmes, micro and macro level economic policies, information technology, health, drinking water, industry, natural resources, agriculture, irrigation, livestock and environment, were also highlighted.
Allocations should be made in the budget for providing interest-free loans to small farmers and all the previous agriculture loans on small farmers should be waived off and role of International Financial Institutions (IFIs) must reduce in budget and economic policies, the speaker demanded.
The event has been organised in order to draw the attention of policy makers towards the concerns of general masses regarding the budgetary process. Civil society organisations under the banner of ELBAG advocate for peoples' participation in financial decision making. The speaker included Azhar Lashary, Sikandar Brohi, Aasim Sajjad Akhtar, Karamat Ali and Fikre Zewdie.