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The External Influences
       Development Fund. Further generous contributions from these and
       other governments followed in subsequent years.119
         When Shaikh Zavid bin Sultan became Ruler in Abu Dhabi in
       August 1966 he immediately gave £500,000 to the Development
       Fund. He contributed a further £365,000 in April 1967, one million
       pounds Sterling in September 1967 and another £300,000 in August
       1968. Until the end of 1972, when (he Fund was disbanded and the
       duties of the Development Office were transferred to the new federal
       ministries, Abu Dhabi’s contributions rose steadily until they
       covered 80 per cent of the total budget.
         From 1965 more long-term projects could be budgeted for because
       considerably larger sums of money were available. Although one
       might expect that the Fund would be primarily concerned with the
       implementation of capital projects, it also had to contribute to
       maintenance and running costs of installations already constructed.
       With the exception of Dubai, the northern States had no budgets of
       their own to pay for the running costs of water-distillation plants and
       electric generators. Such services were provided at low cost to the
       consumers and had to be heavily subsidised by the Fund. In the 1971
       budget there was also a sharp increase in the cost of health services
       following the establishment of new health centres at Ra’s al
       Khaimah, Dibah, Sharjah, and Daid.120 Subsidies for running-costs
       were largely responsible for the fact that the Fund’s money could not
       be evenly distributed to benefit all the northern States equally. The
       statistics show that the smaller and the less developed the State, the
       greater was the annual per capita assistance. To the end of 1970, BD
       1,300,772 had been spent by the Fund on Sharjah (population
       31,500), which was an annual average of BD 6.90 per inhabitant;
        while the annual average was BD 27.90 for the 3,700 inhabitants of
       Umm al Qai wain, and BD 0.80 for 59,000 inhabitants of Dubai.121 The
       biggest single item in every budget, of great benefit to all the States,
       was the provision for the construction of roads, and the Trucial
        States Council always agreed to give priority to the improvement of
       communications.122
         The most obvious advantage of channelling assistance through the
       Development Office, as opposed to promoting individual develop­
        ment projects either through the Political Agency or through the
       individual Rulers’ courts, was that a number of people could be
       employed whose specialised training and experience in other
        developing countries gave the Office the necessary expertise for long-

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