Pakistan to spend Rs 1 trillion on infrastructure in semi-autonomous tribal region

ISLAMABAD: The Pakistan government has announced that it will spend about 1 trillion over the next ten years to build infrastructure in its Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and bring the region on a par with other parts of the country.
“At least 1,000 billion rupees would be required for development in FATA over the next ten years,” Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi announced on the floor of the National Assembly on Wednesday.
The prime minister said that all legal requirements for the development funds would be completed within four weeks — before the government completes its five-year term on May 30.
Last month, Pakistan extended the jurisdictions of the Peshawar High Court and Supreme Court for the first time to the tribal areas in a bid to grant constitutional rights to its people.
Legislators and activists from FATA have been pushing the government to bring the tribal areas into the mainstream by building infrastructure and granting constitutional rights to the people.
Shah Jee Gul Afridi, a legislator from the tribal area, said that it was an encouraging development that the government had responded positively to the aspirations of the tribal people.
“Granting legal rights to tribal people and development of the area is the completion of Pakistan,” he told Arab News, adding that the FATA reforms will also help to curb militancy and extremism.
Besides allocation of the development funds, the government is going to scrap the Frontier Crimes Regulations (FCR) through legislation, he said. The FCR is a set of archaic colonial laws that allow tribes to be punished collectively for crimes committed by individual members.
A six-member government committee on FATA reforms presented a detailed report to the parliament in August 2016 recommending that the federal government merge the tribal area with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province and give them representation in the provincial assembly, as well as increasing development allocations.
The reforms process could not gain momentum due to opposition of the two government allied parties — Jamiat Ulma-e-Pakistan Fazal (JUI-F) and Pukhtunkhwa Milli Awami Party (PkMAP) — despite the support of all the opposition parties in parliament.
JUI-F legislator Naeema Kishwar Khan said that her party was not against the FATA reforms, but objected only to the merger of the tribal areas with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. “We have requested that the government seek the opinion of tribal people through a referendum before making any decision about their fate,” she said.
The legislator, however, admitted that the ruling party had a majority in the National Assembly and also enjoyed the support of the opposition parties on the matter, so it could easily pass the required legislation to mainstream the tribal areas.
A poll conducted by Islamabad-based think tank FATA Research Center in February last year found widespread support for merging FATA with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Of those surveyed, 54 percent endorsed the idea fully and 20 percent partially, while 26 percent said that FATA should be a separate province.
Hashim Khan Afridi, a director in the FATA Secretariat, said that the extra allocation of funds by the federal government would be used to rebuild hospitals, educational institutions and other infrastructure destroyed by militants.
He said that the militants had destroyed 1,300 government-run schools out of a total of 5,994 in the tribal region and only 900 of them have been constructed so far.
“The extra allocation of funds will not only help build critical infrastructure, but also help create job opportunities for youth,” he told Arab News.

Pakistan to spend Rs 1 trillion on infrastructure in semi-autonomous tribal region