KARACHI: The Sindh Assembly which started a general discussion on the provincial budget for the year 2015-16 on Tuesday witnessed no fireworks that were feared to take place amid the opposition bench’s strong reservations over what they claimed “a biased approach towards the urban areas reflected in the allocations” proposed by Finance Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah.

The opposition benches, headed by the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), had disrupted the finance minister’s budget speech by raising slogans and the MQM had even given a province-wide strike call against the budget. However, the Tuesday session started with a poor attendance of opposition MPAs while the treasury benches started losing strength when Chief Minister Syed Qaim Ali Shah left the house after attending the session for some time. The attendance reduced to the extent that Speaker Agha Siraj Durrani had to adjourn the session at 2:10pm for want of quorum and the MQM lawmaker, Dilawar Qureshi, had to stop speaking. The session was adjourned till 10am on Wednesday.

Only 10 lawmakers, five belonging to the ruling Pakistan Peoples Party, four to the MQM and one to the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf, could speak on the budget during the shortened deliberations.

Dr Sohrab Sarki of the PPP initiated the discussion and highlighted the main features of the budget. He urged the opposition to appreciate the finance minister’s extraordinary efforts in ensuring the best possible budget within the available resources.

Other PPP lawmakers Syed Nasir Hussain Shah, Mahesh Kumar Malani and Rehana Leghari congratulated the chief minister and the finance minister for presenting the best possible budget within the limited resources available to the province. They termed it a “people-friendly budget”.

The Pakistan Muslim League-Functional (PML-F) and Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) which were on the forefront when the opposition benches had vigorously tried to disrupt the budget speech on Saturday, did not even nominate their members to speak on the budget despite repeated calls by the chair.

The attitude of treasury benches also appeared to be lackadaisical as most PPP lawmakers kept sitting in the house until the chief minister was there. As soon as Mr Shah left the house, they started following suit one after the other leaving almost all the treasury seats vacant.

The opposition lawmakers mainly targeted the finance minister for ignoring their respective development schemes proposed during the pre-budget discussion in the assembly. They deplored that even those schemes which had been approved under the previous year’s ADP were also dropped.

Dr Sohrab Sarki of the PPP initiating the discussion on the budget said that in view of the limited resources the government has presented the best people-friendly budget.

MQM lawmakers severely criticised the government for “fomenting an urban-rural divide by ignoring cities in the proposed annual development programme (ADP)”. Mohammad Hussain of the MQM termed it an anti-Sindh budget that had virtually divided the province into the urban and rural areas. He said that Rs49 billion was earmarked for Karachi but if calculated in certain terms, the amount was not more than Rs18 billion. “Our 51 MPAs had submitted 188 schemes but not a single one has been included in the ADP,” he said. He also questioned justification of dropping the schemes approved under the previous year’s ADP.

His party colleague Khalid Ahmad told the house that corruption and bad governance were the two major challenges the Sindh government had to face. He said the twin menace had pushed the province, including Karachi, far behind in the education sector. He said the allocations proposed for mega projects in Karachi were so meagre that they could not be completed even in 10 years. He also criticised the proposal regarding tax on services, arguing that the burden would ultimately shift to the common man.

Engineer Sabir Hussain Qaimkhani said the budget was devoid of vision or political acumen. He suggested that like property tax being levied in cities, a six per cent tax on agriculture income should be levied.

Dilawar Qureshi described the allocation of billions of rupees for development schemes in Sindh as “irrelevant” and apprehended that the entire amount would be usurped by corrupt elements. He said that three approved health schemes for Latifabad in the current ADP were now shifted to Qasimabad while no new scheme for Hyderabad was included in the new ADP. “Justice is not being done with cities,” he said.

Published in Dawn, June 17th, 2015

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