October 14, 2007	Sunday	Shawwal 1, 1428

TAXILA, Oct 13: Tehsil nazim Taxila and PML district Rawalpindi general secretary Mohammad Sadeeq Khan has said opposition’s demand to suspend local governments before the general elections will affect the ongoing development work in the country.

Talking to newsmen here on Saturday, he said local governments were acting as frontline service providers which would become redundant if their supervisory role was eliminated or even curtailed. The local governments, he said, had been allowed to operate freely during the 2002 elections, so suspension of the system before the next elections made no sense. He suggested that if the government wanted to contain the role of elected representatives in the general elections, it should take an undertaking from them that they would not involve themselves in the electoral process. If anybody violated the undertaking, the government should take action against them.

It may be mentioned that some opposition parties especially the People’s Party Parliamentarians (PPP) on Tuesday demanded that the government should suspend local government institutions and freeze their funds three months prior to the forthcoming general elections to ensure transparency of the process.—Correspondent