Ishaq Dar Presses for Faster Spending as Development Funds Lag

Deputy Prime Minister Ishaq Dar’s latest instruction to the committee overseeing Pakistan’s flagship development spending vehicle was almost identical to the one he gave three months ago: get local communities involved in picking projects, and finish the ones already funded. The repetition matters, because the underlying spending numbers explain exactly why he keeps having to say it.

Dar chaired the Steering Committee of the Sustainable Development Goals Achievement Programme, directing that local communities be involved in identifying basic infrastructure schemes to ensure funds serve public interest, and stressing timely completion of existing schemes to maximize benefit from allocated money. The meeting drew ministers for Inter-Provincial Coordination, Planning and Development, Science and Technology, Communications and Parliamentary Affairs, alongside SAPM Tariq Bajwa and secretaries from Cabinet, Power and Housing and Works, plus representation from all four provinces — a lineup that signals the programme’s cross-cutting reach into nearly every federal spending ministry.

The instruction lands against a spending record that’s been publicly documented as underwhelming. Pakistan’s own Monthly Development Update showed that through the first ten months of the last fiscal year, only 56% of Public Sector Development Programme allocations had been released, with actual utilization trailing release by roughly 18 percentage points — meaning even the money that reached implementing agencies wasn’t being spent on schedule. The gap wasn’t uniform: SAP-funded parliamentarians’ schemes performed comparatively well, with nearly 70% of a 63 billion rupee allocation released and largely used within five months, while merged districts of the former FATA region received just 31% of their annual allocation against 89% utilization in Azad Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan — a regional disparity that undercuts the programme’s stated goal of serving underprivileged communities most in need.

That’s the real context behind Dar’s repeated emphasis on “local community involvement.” Officials have described the participatory approach as an attempt to better align projects with actual local needs — health, education, transport, utilities — rather than centrally dictated schemes that may not match what communities on the ground actually require. Whether that approach addresses the disbursement bottleneck specifically, as opposed to project selection, is a separate question the committee’s public readouts haven’t directly addressed.

This is at least the programme’s several-dozenth steering committee session under Dar’s chairmanship since 2024, a cadence — roughly monthly to quarterly — that reflects how central SAP has become to the government’s development messaging even as independent spending data shows persistent underutilization. The committee’s own directive that unspent savings from previous years be reinvested within the same sector and province suggests officials are aware carryover funds are becoming a recurring feature rather than an exception.

Whether faster spending follows this meeting the way it hasn’t fully followed the last several will likely be visible in the next Monthly Development Update — the actual scorecard against which Dar’s repeated instructions are being measured.