https://thefridaytimes.com/28-Jun-2025/ ... c-genocide
Punjab’s celebrated tax‑free budget is a starvation blueprint for thirty‑five million South Punjabis. While Lahore feasts on seventy‑eight billion rupees for a luxury cancer hospital, our children drink arsenic‑laced water from contaminated wells. This deliberate imbalance is not fiscal management—it is economic genocide against Punjab’s backbone.
Ring‑fencing was our lifeline. The Pakistan Tehreek‑e‑Insaf’s thirty‑five percent funding guarantee was flawed but vital. The Pakistan Muslim League‑Nawaz did not adjust it—they savaged it without mercy. Today, South Punjab receives less than eighteen percent of development funds while Lahore hoards seventy‑eight billion rupees for its third cancer facility. This is daylight robbery disguised as technocratic policy, a financial crime against humanity.
Healthcare disparities reveal brutal truths. South Punjab’s entire health budget equals ten billion rupees, barely enough for bandages across eleven districts. Lahore devours one hundred eighty‑one billion, building palaces of marble where robotic arms perform surgeries. Clean‑water access? Multan receives zero rupees for water infrastructure while Lahore spends one hundred forty‑seven billion on gold‑plated filtration systems. Our roads crumble under thirty‑one billion rupees of patchwork funding while Lahore paves highways with one hundred twenty billion. These numbers are death warrants signed in budget documents, legalised murder through spreadsheet entries.
In Rajanpur, I have watched mothers walk twelve kilometres to clinics with no doctors, no medicines—just empty cabinets and hollow promises. They cradle dying malaria‑stricken infants in waiting rooms while Lahore’s elite undergo robotic surgeries costing one hundred nine billion rupees. Consider the human cost: Tarn Taran endures one doctor per forty‑seven hundred people while Lahore boasts one per three hundred fifty. This is not accidental inequality—it is systematic extermination of marginalised communities through calculated bureaucratic neglect.
A separate South Punjab province offers our only escape from this exploitation. As an autonomous region, we would receive nine hundred thirty‑four billion rupees from National Finance Commission transfers—our rightful twenty‑three percent share currently stolen by Lahore. We would generate fifty billion more from fair agriculture taxes and one hundred twenty billion from sugar‑industry levies. This one‑point‑one‑trillion‑rupee annual budget could fund twenty comprehensive cancer hospitals with oncology wards, fifty universities with research laboratories, and modern water‑treatment plants providing clean water to every district. Lahore fears this economic emancipation because it ends their colonial control over our resources and labour force.
