By: Zulfiqar Ali (Kashmir Investigation Team)
MUZAFFARABAD: The Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) government claims to allocate a development budget of Rs 44 billion in the financial year 2024-2025 turned out to be a lie.
The Government of Pakistan provided a grant of Rs 28 billion to Azad Kashmir for development projects. The coalition government of Azad Kashmir also announced that it would add Rs 12 billion from its local revenues to the development budget.
But there is no mention of these Rs 12 billion in the budget expenditure of Azad Kashmir, which means that the government has not allocated a single rupee from its resources.
Sources in the Planning and Development Department of Azad Kashmir confirmed that they did not receive any money from the government for development projects, nor was any money allocated for it. Sources in the Finance Department said that there is no such item in the budget expenditure.
A senior government official said that this was nothing but a political statement.
This is not the first time, government issued false claims, in the last financial year too, the coalition government had claimed that it had included Rs 12 billion in the development budget from its own resources and presented it as a “major success” in government advertisements, but at the end of the year it was revealed that the government had not allocated or spent a single rupee from its own income on development projects.
This was also confirmed by the Planning and Development and Finance departments.
A senior Azad Kashmir official said that they cannot spend the grants provided by the Pakistani government within the stipulated time, so in such a situation, even if more money is allocated, how will it be spent?
In the outgoing financial year, the federal government provided Rs 28 billion, but the Azad Kashmir government has been able to spend only Rs 20 billion in the first eleven months till the end of May, which is only 72 percent of the total amount.
What is more worrying is that the money spent has also been used inefficiently. Most of the funds were spent on link roads, which are not expected to bring any significant economic benefits, nor create employment opportunities.
The same situation prevailed in the last financial year (2023-24). The federal government allocated a development budget of Rs 25.5 billion, but only Rs 14 billion was spent in the first eleven months, while Rs 11.5 billion was claimed to have been spent in the month of June alone, which seems unbelievable in terms of figures.
Now that the federal government has increased the development budget of Azad Kashmir to Rs 45 billion for the next financial year, the biggest question is: How will this huge amount be spent? On which projects will it be spent? And who will be held accountable for it?
What is more regrettable is that no audit report has been issued in Azad Kashmir for the last three years. A major reason for this is that there is no Public Accounts Committee in the Azad Kashmir Assembly, which is considered the basic institution of financial accountability in any democratic system.
Another question also raised is that when the government of Azad Kashmir does not allocate a single rupee from its own resources for the development budget, why does it claim to include Rs 12 billion in the development budget?
There is only one possible answer to this: to give the impression to the federal government that Azad Kashmir is playing a role in the development process with its resources, so that more funds can be obtained from Islamabad.
But the reality is that there is no transparent system for spending these funds, no planning skills, and no institutional capacity. This is the reason why, despite the grants of more than Rs 300 billion received from Pakistan in the last twenty years, no major and sustainable development project is visible in Azad Kashmir.
