ISLAMABAD, June 30: Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani apparently shrugged off economic woes for a while in the National Assembly on Tuesday to give a windfall to the lower house members by doubling their annual development fund to Rs20 million each on the eve of the new fiscal year.

He gave no reason for the increase announced in a single sentence before the house was prorogued after a 19-day budget session.

“(In regard to the new budget) … I announce to double the MNAs’ fund of one crore (10 million) rupees (each),” Mr Gilani said at the end of one of his usual interventions in house proceedings.

It was not immediately clear if the 100 per cent increase in the fund, which will total Rs6.84 billion for 342 members of the National Assembly, would apply also to the 100 members of the Senate, who until now had been on a par with their lower house counterparts for these allocations, which are spent on development schemes proposed by MPs without transferring any amounts to them.

But the practice, continuing since late 1980s, has often been described by critics as a kind of political bribe to lawmakers, particularly during the previous government when then-prime minister Shaukat Aziz stopped giving funds to the opponents of military president Pervez Musharraf.

Though the increase in the amount was greeted with desk-thumping from both ruling coalition and opposition benches, questions are likely to be asked outside parliament about the justification of an apparent appeasement of lawmakers when the country was facing severe economic hardships and financial stringency blamed on the policies of the previous government and a worldwide recession.

The new move, which was not even mentioned by the government when the budget for fiscal 2009-10 was presented to parliament on June 13 nor was asked for in budget debates in both the National Assembly and the Senate, leaves the question of the required additional funds unexplained.

POWER TARIFF: In other developments on what was a private members’ day, Parliamentary Affairs Minister Babar Awan repeated a recent assurance by Prime Minister Gilani that any increase in electricity rates would have to await the elimination of the present outages, which became harsher last week after an interruption of power generation at Mangla dam owing to technical faults.

But the minister, responding to members’ protests during a brief debate on power cuts, or loadshedding, on an adjournment motion moved by the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), warned the Karachi Electric Supply Company (KESC) that its 2005 privatisation could be undone if it failed to meet the requirements of the country’s commercial capital.

He said the KESC had failed to improve its efficiency according to people’s expectations and added: “If the process of failures of the KESC continues and complaints are not removed, then the government can move… towards its de-privatisation.”

MQM’s Haider Abbas Rizvi, who recited several verses of Mirza Ghalib, Mir Taqi Mir as well as of Ahmad Faraz as sung by Mehdi Hassan to describe the present power crisis, said the situation was “growing into a tsunami” and called for avoiding unscheduled loadshedding.

PML-N’s Rashid Akhtar Niwani called for the removal of the managing director of Pakistan Electric Power Company whom he accused of seeking to make the government a failure.

Several other members from both the ruling coalition and the opposition voiced concerns of their regions, like PPP’s newcomer Changez Khan Jamali complaining of injustices to Balochistan and announcing his decision to close his account with the National Bank of Pakistan in protest, and PML-Q’s Sardar Bahadur Khan Sehar pleading for the creation of a separate province in the Seraiki-speaking southern Punjab.

SUGAR CHALLENGE: Minister of State for Finance and Revenue Hina Rabbani Khar told the house earlier in response to a call-attention notice that the government had taken a serious notice of the continuing increase in the price of sugar and that the Economic Coordination Committee of the cabinet had asked for a report from the production ministry.

She said prices of other commodities of daily use had shown a downward trend in recent months from last year’s perceived “super inflation” and the government hoped to bring down inflation to a single digit in the coming months.

But she said this was not the case with sugar, which the government had taken “as a big challenge”.

Members from both sides of the house introduced eight private bills seeking amendments to different laws.

But a bill that was praised by the prime minister during his intervention for its aim to prevent domestic violence on women and children and was ready for consideration after passing through a standing committee was not taken up because its author, PPP’s Yasmeen Rehman, was absent from the house at the time.
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