Rs 236bln Sindh budget presented


KARACHI: Sindh Senior Minister, Syed Sardar Ahmed on Friday presented Rs 236 billion budget of Sindh province for the fiscal 2007-08 during the budget session of the Sindh Assembly.

The budget session of Sindh Assembly commenced on Friday evening. Speaker, Syed Muzaffar Hussain Shah, was in the chair.

The record amount of Rs 71 billion has been allocated for the development programme of the province.

The scale promotion and 15 percent in the increase of the government employees of the province was also announced in the budget.

"I am pleased to announce that following the announcement of the federal government, salary of all government pensioners has been raised by 15 percent", he announced.

Sardar Ahmed said the pension of government pensioners has been increased in two tiers. Old pensioners will get 20percent raise while the new pensioners will get 15 percent increase in their pension.

He said on persistent demand of the clerical staff, the federal government has upgraded the employees of BS-5, BS-7and BS-11 and promoted them to BS-7, BS-9 and BS-14 respectively.

The Minister said the Sindh government follows suit and extends similar benefit to its clerical staff.
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now a very important question:

Is this $4 billion out of the $23 billion federal budget? or is that something separate.

I think its probably out of the federal budget as otherwise it would become way too much money for Pakistan.

Federal budget was $31 billion and not $23 billion. And i think this is separate budget but i am not sure.

And yes this is separate budget now this is confirmed.

really? That is surprising. Why do we have such crap infrastructure in Pakistan then if both federal and provincial govt has billions to spend?

c'mon man do you really want to even ask that qn?! there's no real accountability for any of the assemblies (whether provincial or national), elections are a farce and I've yet to hear of any provincial or national assembly representative getting kicked out by voters cause he didn't serve them well.

how much do u want to bet that a fair share of these billions will end up in Swiss bank accounts before the year finishes?

regards.

As far as i know, STATE budget is based on what is given by the federal government for the states to spend. So federal government allocted certain amount for each state. Than each state makes its own budget, so yeh its a separate budget in sense state can spend as they please, but the money flow directly from Federal government.

Did you forget the 1990s so easily?

ok so thats what I was thinking, its not like federal govt has $30 billion to spend, and in addition the provinces have billions to spend as well.

Pakistan is a poor country and when you only have $30 billion total, with 1.3rd of that taken up by defense and debt payments, you can understand why we have such crap infrastructure and education and health facilities.

Not really 1/3 use to go to the defence now its mere 18% or less. As for infrastructure and education and health. Well as Mark said our position in 90s did bring us down, but still i fail to understand y there is lak of specding in those critical areas. we have this huge Rs500b ($8.33b)+ spending for development while our education, health spending is very minimum. Its a sad story, we could easily cut the development down to Rs300b and incrase our health and education by Rs200b and get private sector to invest in development programs.... If we dont pay attention to the critical areas we will be big losers.

Not fully, a big portion of provencial budget comes from resources allocated in fedral budget, portion of it comes from states own resources.

U r right, the state government can raise funds, but since state government does not have the power to collect taxes (it can impose taxes) but mostly its collected by Federal Revenue collection and than the revenue are redistributed based on the needs of the province, however stuff like land tax i think is directly collect by state so they rasie their own revenue. I was just trying to explain that State does not have all the funding it self and THANKS for correcting what i missed out.