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ISLAMABAD, May 25: President Pervez Musharraf on Wednesday called the National Assembly to meet on June 2 to begin its budget session with very little signs of cheer yet amid one of the country’s worst inflationary periods. This will be the third budget session of the present lower house where Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz will present the first budget of his nine-month-old government on June 6, though he also authored all five previous budgets as finance minister after General Musharraf took power in October 1999.
An announcement by the National Assembly secretariat said the president had summoned the house to meet in the parliament house on June 2 at 5pm.
There was no official word yet on whether the prime minister, who is also the finance minister, will personally unveil the budget for fiscal 2005-06 on June 6 or ask his young Minister of State for Finance Omar Ayub to do the difficult job and possibly face opposition jeers.
NEW BUDGET DAY: It will be a novelty in Pakistan that the federal budget will be presented on a Monday, contrary to the past practice of doing it on a Saturday – or Thursday when Friday was the weekend instead of Sunday – to guard against manipulations and allow one immediate closed holiday for markets to adjust to new taxation proposals.
There has been no explanation yet of this departure.
Mr Aziz had presented the last budget on June 12 — a Saturday — as finance minister of then-prime minister Zafarullah Khan Jamali, who was to resign 17 days later to make way for him with Pakistan Muslim League president Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain standing in for an interim period of nearly two months.
There are no such destabilising fears now after President Musharraf apparently gave a pep talk to PML leaders on May 16 to calm down raging controversies among them on how the ruling party and its government were being run.
But despite an estimated higher gross domestic growth rate of more than eight per cent, the prime minister is likely to face a storm of opposition criticism over other aspects of the economy such as the highest inflation rate — about 10 per cent from the original estimates of five per cent — in eight years, a highest ever trade deficit, unemployment and the recent stock market crash.
Though the cabinet has promised a salary increase for government employees, only the budget day will tell what relief is in store for other sectors and the common man from a biting price hike while a decision to import certain food items from neighbouring India has not made any impact yet.
Unlike last year, the prime minister has given no assurance yet against imposing new taxes in the budget. There is speculation about taxing agriculture, but such a proposal will surely invite a stiff opposition from landowners dominating the ruling coalition.
