ISLAMABAD, March 4: The National Assembly on Tuesday urged the United States to immediately stop what it called discriminatory treatment being meted out to Pakistanis living there and their large-scale deportation.

A resolution unanimously passed by the house said: “This house is of the opinion that the US government should immediately stop discrimination being meted out to Pakistani nationals in America and end their large-scale deportation. The American government should not go about Pakistanis in application of the discriminatory laws”.

The resolution was moved by PML-N MNA Ishaq Khakwani and backed by many members from both treasury and opposition benches on the present session’s first private members’ day.

In another unanimously adopted resolution, the house asked the government to take steps aimed at reducing the drug prices. The resolution said that multi-national pharmaceutical companies should be forced to fix prices competitive with those in neighbouring countries such as India and Iran.

The resolution, whose implementation is not mandatory, called for the introduction of generic names of medicines instead of their brand names, as a means to check their prices.

Health Minister Muhammad Nasir Khan said the government was working to reduce the medicine prices and would abide by the house recommendations.

However, he pointed out, the government could not force the multi-national pharmaceutical companies to reduce their prices to the extent that they lose profitability.

Members urged the government to make sure that the prices of life-saving drugs remained within the reach of the common man and that such medicines were available free of cost at all public hospitals.

Moving the resolution, PPP’s Ghulam Murtaza made a stunning comparison between retail market prices of life-saving injections and drugs and much lower prices charged by the government. Multi-national companies, he said, were charging high profit from the common man. He said an injection used in heart attack cases was available in retail market at Rs5,500 while its cost for government employees and influential people at public hospitals was only Rs1,700.

PML-N leader Makhdoom Javed Hashmi asked the government to check medicine prices which, he said, had been increased three times since his party’s government was toppled in 1999 coup.

MMA member Hanif Abbasi, who took the floor first time after winning a by-election against a nephew of Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed, complained that work on development schemes initiated during the election campaign on the orders of Prime Minister Zafarullah Khan Jamali had stopped after the by-election was over.

He said drug prices had been enhanced 1,000 times over the last three years by the health ministry officials in connivance with multi-nationals. He proposed that the government should take steps to support and strengthen local pharmaceutical companies.

ROW OVER SINDH GOVERNOR: An MQM member, Abbas Haider Rizvi, received an immediate rebuttal from the PPP when he, on a point of order, asked the members to shun calling Sindh Governor Ishratul Ibad an absconder in the wake of the withdrawal of cases against him.