ISLAMABAD, June 8: PPP Chairperson Benazir Bhutto has said that the federal budget has failed to address measures badly needed to stimulate economy and to protect the working-class, middle-class and white-collar class of the country.

“The inability of the budget to address the issue of increasing poverty is of greatest concern to the Pakistan People’s Party which is the voice of the poor and downtrodden, the exploited and the discriminated,” Ms Bhutto asserted in a statement issued here on Sunday.

She said she was shocked to find that the budget lacked measures to help reduce poverty.

She said nothing was said in the budget about increasing industrial productivity. “It is astonishing to find that the finance minister claimed that the debt had come down when the State Bank’s website said the opposite.”

Ms Bhutto condemned the rise in prices. She noted that while diesel went up by 100 per cent, the government employees’ salaries were increased only by 15 per cent. She said the electricity went up by 50 per cent but pensioners only received a 15 per cent raise.

She said it was useless to talk about foreign exchange reserves, which owed their rise to the attack on the World Trade Centre and the international situation that developed after the attack. She said the national growth could only be achieved through economic activity.

However, due to dismal and anti-people policies of the Musharraf regime, there was a total lack of economic activity, which had led to massive unemployment, inflation and recession, she said.

Ms Bhutto said the prime cause of the collapse of economic activity and the recession was that there was political instability in the country. She said the political instability had been caused by the dismissal of the PPP government in 1996 and it could only end when the PPP returned to power.

Giving its reaction to the national budget, Pakistan Tehreek-i- Insaf termed the budget a reflection of visionless economic policies being pursued by the Jamali government. “If we continue to tinker with number and rely on comparisons with equally dismal previous budgets, our society will remain condemned to perpetual poverty and ignorance,” Mr Akbar S. Babar, Central Information Secretary of the PTI, said in a statement issued here on Sunday.

He said the budget had no legal basis. As long as the LFO issue was not resolved and parliament remained incomplete without a constitutionally-elected president, the budget proposals had little legal sanctity.

He said the budget proposals meant nothing if allocated resources did not give a roadmap to free the people from unemployment. Despite claims of micro-economic stability, these vital indicators continued to deteriorate, he claimed.