The 9th meeting of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa caretaker cabinet was held here on Wednesday with Caretaker Chief Minister Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Muhammad Azam Khan in the chair. Besides caretaker cabinet members, the meeting was attended by Chief Secretary, Nadeem Aslam Chaudhry and concerned administrative secretaries. In his address to the participants of the meeting, the Chief Minister welcomed the new cabinet members.
Touching upon the role and mandate of caretaker government as prescribed in constitution and Election Commission Act 2017, the Chief Minister said that role/ responsibilities and dos/donts of caretaker setup were very much clear in the relevant provisions of the constitution and ECP Act adding that the caretaker government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa will keep itself restricted to its constitutional and legal role, it is purely apolitical, and impartial setup; and will perform its duties without any sort of political affiliation.
Azam Khan remarked that the caretaker government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is faced with two major challenges of law & order and financial crunches, and continued that improvement of the prevailing law & order situation would be the top priority of his government and the government would make all out efforts to this end.
“The province is largely dependent on federal government with regard to its revenue, and more than 90 percent of its revenue comes from various federal receipts”, Azam Khan maintained and said that with the merger of Ex-FATA, the population of the province has increased, and as per the existing population, the NFC shares of the province comes to 19 percent of the total but unfortunately, its getting only 14.6 percent.
The Chief Minister remarked that at the time of Ex-FATA merger it was committed by all the federating entities that three percent of their NFC share would be provided for the newly merged districts whereas, it was also pledged that Rs.100 billion would be provided to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa every year for the accelerated development of the NMDs, but during the last five years only 103 billion have been provided to the province out of the total 500 billion. Touching upon the issue of net hydel profit, the Chief Minister said that as per the AGN Qazi formula, Rs.1200 billion dues are pending against the federal government adding that in the given scenario, fast track uplift of the newly merged districts has become very difficult.
