Senate panel objects to distribution of pool resources on population basis.

A Senate committee on Thursday asked the federal and provincial governments to put an end to the practice of distributing divisible pool resources on the basis of population and attach more importance to the development of less developed areas.

The meeting of the Senate Standing Committee on Less Developed Areas presided over by Senator Usman Kakar said the government should stop distribution of resources on the basis of population because 71 per cent of the country's areas were underdeveloped but they received less than 20pc of the budgetary allocations.

The meeting was called to deliberate on and review the operations of small and medium enterprises of the Ministry of Industries and Production working in various less-developed areas. The committee underlined the need for allocating more resources to these areas in the next budget.

Mr Kakar regretted that despite being a cultural hub and blessed with mineral resources, areas of the erstwhile Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) and Provincially Administered Tribal Areas (Pata), interior of Sindh, Punjab (other than their major cities) and Balochistan were the least-developed areas.

'It is a pity. We should change this trend and the pattern of distributing funds on the basis of population must be curbed,' he said.

At present, for horizontal distribution of divisible pool taxes among the provinces under the National Finance Commission (NFC) 82pc weight is assigned to population, 10.3pc to poverty and backwardness, and 2.7pc to inverse population density.

On top of that, major uplift activities out of the federal and provincial development budgets were largely allocated to large population centres, a senator said.

Adviser to the Prime Minister on Industries and Production Abdul Razak Dawood said that every area in the country and around the world had some skill or some specialty that could be promoted and the Ministry of Industries and Production was working tirelessly for this purpose.

He said the Tharparkar region would be...