MULTAN, April 1: Only those technocrats should be allowed to contest elections who have the membership of councils constituted under parliamentary act.

Talking to newsmen here on Sunday, Pakistan Engineering Forum president Syed Imtiaz Shah said the condition would ensure presence of expert technocrats in parliament.

He said the condition that a technocrat could contest election after two years of his retirement should either be waived or the time frame be reduced.

The elected governments in the past could not succeed in making a result-oriented policy for the lack of proper representation of technocrats in parliament, he said. They rather took some wrong decisions which proved harmful to agriculture as well as industrial sectors, he added.

The country, Mr Shah said, was facing acute water crisis because the water storage capacity of dams was 26 million acre feet while over 100 million acre feet of water was discharged in the sea. No government could resolve the problem for the issue had become controversial among provinces, he claimed.

Mr Shah said the nationalization of industry in the 1970s and agreements with independent power producers (IPPs) in the 1980s were the decisions taken for political gains without consulting technocrats which caused irreparable harm to the economy.

Since technocrats would have substantial representation in the next elected parliament, they would formulate policies which would bring economy back on rails, he concluded. — Nouman