The budgets of all the provinces are now in, having been presented before their respective provincial assemblies, with only a fortnight to spare for passage, so that the next financial year starts with the provinces able to pay the provincial employees their salaries. None of the provinces has taken any particular step which would indicate that they have taken any particular measure which is not centrally directed. The problem is that the main face of the government that the citizens are supposed to see is that of the province. He is supposed to be .
There educated at a government school, then college, go to a government hospital if he falls sick, and if he is unlucky enough to be murdered, his heirs will go to the police, and the case will be tried in a court system provided by the province. The citizen will basically be in touch with the federal government through the National Database and Registration Authority, who will then connect him to the Central Board of Revenue.
The structure of government is still the same as under the British Raj. The East India Company initially set up three factories at Bombay, Madras and Calcutta, and these factories then developed great provinces around them, called presidency provinces. In the 16th century, the Governor at Calcutta was also the Viceroy. The Bengal Presidency began to break up the larger it grew, which was because the Raj was expanding. When the Punjab was taken over by the Bengal Presidency, a Lieutenant-Governor was appointed, but he was independent, except as much as he answered to the Viceroy. Thus provinces acted as the fonts of authority, with the central government performing a sort of coordinating role, Partition seems to have ended this autonomy on both sides of the border, with the main issue being the mutual division of finances.
Now, well over seven decades after the first post-Independence budgets were presented, the issues seem not to have been resolved. The provinces still seem to be short of the funds they need to deliver the services they are supposed to provide. The taxes they have are inelastic, and they are only going ahead with an agricultural income tax.
There is much to be done on resource distribution. The federal-provincial split has been frozen, and this has caused rumblings of discontent, with the latest to join the chorus being Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal,, and Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb. However, the proper forum to settle the basis of distribution is a National Finance Commission, which only the federal government can summon.
