PESHAWAR: Pakistan’s northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa may have attained self-sufficiency in revenue generation due to the comparative advantage in some industrial sectors, but the dearth of capital hampered industrialisation in the province, a researcher said yesterday.
Speaking at the public defence of her PhD, Neelofar Asghar said Khyber Pakhtunkhwa was poorest among the four federating units despite availability of hardworking labour force, capital and raw material.
The topic of Neelofar, a research scholar at the department of Political Science, was “Unequal Development in a Peripheral Capitalist State: A Case Study of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province of Pakistan (1947 - 1977).”
She said the federation of Pakistan based on the India Act of 1935 became a highly centralised federal system relegating provinces to own 30 percent of their resources.
A federal system is not just about bicameral legislature, but an empowered Senate, she said, adding, the federal system is more about equal power-sharing in resource allocations, revenue generation, institutional and political representation.
The researcher believed legitimacy of the Constitution should be ensured through fair and equitable distribution of resources.
Unequal development is neither an attribute of ethnic, linguistic or racial factors, nor a result of petty bourgeois discontentment institutionally;
It is engendered due to centralisation of resources in core areas, she maintained.
