SUKKUR: Leader of the Opposition in the National Assembly Syed Khursheed Ahmed Shah has said that the federal government is leading the country to an economic collapse by planning to privatise profit-making national institutions and executing the maga projects that are causing losses of billions of rupees annually to the exchequer.

At a joint press conference along with Senator Islamuddin Shaikh and MNA Noman Islam Shaikh at the Sukkur press club on Wednesday, Mr Shah said he and the Shaikh family had shun their differences over petty issues in the greater interest of the PPP and decided to strengthen the party in the upper Sindh areas.

The PPP leaders severely criticised the PML-N government’s flawed policies which, according to them, were causing further deepening of the economic crisis the country was faced with at the moment.

“While the vital institutions like the Pakistan Inter­na­tional Airlines, Water and Power Development Autho­rity, Pakistan Railways and Pakistan Steel Mills are being privatised despite the fact that they were earning profits, the mega projects like the metro bus are being keenly pursued. The Lahore Metro Bus project has already caused a loss of Rs2 billion in the previous fiscal and the loss is feared to double in the current year,” they said.

The PPP leaders said that the agriculture sector was the backbone of the national economy but the farming community was being suppressed by the PML-N government which was bound to cause great damage to this sector.

“Growers are badly hit by enormous imports of agriculture inputs and this coupled with the government’s unpopular policies towards the country’s biggest segment was driving the economy to ultimate collapse,” they argued.

“Devastated by the situation, growers are destroying their standing crops in protest against the heavy losses they are individually suffering,’ they said.

The PPP leaders called for drastically scaling down the prices of agriculture inputs, elimination of fake fertilisers and pesticides businesses, bringing down tractor prices and their hiring rates and introduction of farmer-friendly policies to cope with the situation.

“In the next 25 years, the country’s population is going to cross the 400m mark,” they predicted, and said that the government had not yet started evolving a strategy to meet the serious challenges, mainly food crisis, the nation would have to face as a fallout.

Former MPA Dr Nasrullah Baloch, CM’s special assistant Dr Arshad Mughal, Mushtaq Surhio and several senior PPP activists were present at the press conference.

Published in Dawn, September 10th, 2015

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