LAHORE, June 27: Describing the City District Government budget for the next fiscal year as 'disappointing' and 'misleading', the Lahore District Council opposition councillors have accused District Nazim Mian Amer Mahmood of bulldozing it to deprive them of their democratic right to express their views on it.

Addressing a press conference here on Sunday, opposition leader Naveed Sadiq Khan and councillors Shoaib Khan Niazi, Malik Ilyas, Waheed Alam, Zahoor Wattoo and Hafiz Nasim Chishti said that the budget session was started one and a half hours late. They said the Nazim arrived another half an hour late for presenting the budget to ensure that minimum possible time was left for discussion on it.

The councillors were also not supplied the copies of the budget in advance for study either. They said the Rs5.87 billion CDG budget was lesser than Rs8 billion education budget of Karachi and had been wrongly described as surplus because it showed a Rs141.418 million deficit if Rs156.708 million grant-in-aid was not added to it. Of Rs870.871 million development budget, Rs346.076 million were allocated for the ongoing schemes and only Rs524.814 million comprising less than 10 per cent of the total budget were available for new schemes.

They said contrary to the district Nazim's claims in respect of revolutionizing the education sector, 606 CDG middle and primary schools were without furniture and 604 without electricity out of a total 1,202.

The councillors alleged that the Literacy and Law Department performance was disappointing and only Rs4.85 million or less than Rs1 per head per annum were made available for eight million population of the city district.

They said the CDG could save Rs709.892 million allocated for the Solid Waste Management for spending on development by transferring the responsibility to the towns in accordance with Section 54 (h) of the Punjab Local Government Ordinance but Mian Amer retained it with the CDG.

The property tax recovered for meeting the sanitation costs was being transferred to towns and the Nazim had also retained it with the district government and imposed 30 per cent sanitation fee on water supply bills without prior approval of the district council.

The elected representatives said the district Nazim had also failed to submit the audit reports of the CDG accounts for the past three years before the district council for approval. They said the budget showed an income of Rs20 million from the sale of plots but no approval of the council was sought for the purpose. Special development funds had been allocated for the Data Ganj Bakhsh Town Union Councils to muster support against Town Nazim Khwaja Ahmed Hassaan.