Monumental change: Caring for the living

PESHAWAR, March 28: An advisory committee recently blocked an attempt to use funds meant for small community schemes in the Peshawar district to build a monument in the city in memory of the victims of terrorist and subversive activities. Last week the Chief Minister's Secretariat issued a new directive as a consequence to the authorities handling the monument affairs to spare the funds of the District Development Advisory Committee (DDAC) and arrange the over Rs100 million required for the project from alternative sources, MPA Alamgir Khan Khalil, chairman of Peshawar DDAC, told Dawn. The Peshawar district administration had Rs287 million funds in reserve for local level uplift schemes in different parts of the province, he said. In the absence of local bodies system, local government and rural development (LG&RD) secretary is the competent authority to approve plans for utilisation of funds, meant for the district level development schemes. Senior Minister Bashir Ahmad Bilour, holding the portfolio of LG&RD and a member of DDAC, had directed the authorities to divert over Rs100 million from the said funds for construction of a monument at Jinnah Park in the memory of those, who lost lives in bomb blasts and subversive acts. This idea, however, did not receive any support from DDAC, a body responsible for clearing uplift schemes to be executed with the district development funds. Excluding Mr Bilour, all the 10 MPAs including speaker and deputy speaker of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Assembly moved a joint application to Chief Minister Ameer Haider Khan Hoti, requesting him to drop the plan. The members of DDAC argued, in their application, that funds for district development was meant for small scale schemes such as street pavements, drains or tubewells and the same should not be utilised for building monument. According to Mr Khalil, the chief minister agreed to the demand of DDAC and directed the LG&RD secretary to let DDAC plan uplift schemes as per its requirements and funds for the proposed monument should be arranged from other sources. The provincial government distributes funds among districts under Provincial Finance Commission (PFC) award for their development schemes on the basis of a multi-factoral formula. In the current financial year, the provincial government allocated Rs1.5 billion for 24 districts, of which Rs225 million were supposed to be spent on the chief minister and finance minister's directives, leaving merely Rs1.250 billion for all the districts. "Peshawar district already has little to spend on small scale schemes and it cannot allocate funds as huge as Rs100 million for construction of monument," remarked Mr Khalil, adding the unspent Rs287 million would be equally distributed among 11 constituencies of district Peshawar.