QUETTA, Oct 18: Senior Balochistan Minister Maulana Abdul Wasay said on Saturday that the Nifaz-i-Shariat committee had finalized the draft Shariat bill, that would be reviewed in a provincial Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal meeting before being submitted to the cabinet for approval.

Talking to this correspondent, he said the finalization of the bill was delayed to include the recommendations of religious scholars of different schools of thought in it.

Maulana Wasay said a special session of the provincial assembly could be summoned for tabling the bill if the MMA and the cabinet approved it.

He claimed that there were no differences on the bill among the Pakistan Muslim League, the MMA and the National Alliance and there would be no difficulty in its approval by the cabinet. He said he expected that no assembly member would oppose it.

He said it had been decided that the cabinet would be expanded but the date for inducting new ministers had not been finalized.

He said the PML and the MMA would get equal shares in the expansion of the cabinet as agreed in the accord between the ruling coalition partners.

About his visit with Chief Minister Jam Mohammad Yousuf to Islamabad to discuss the financial problems faced by the province, he said the provincial government had received an encouraging response from Prime Minister Mir Zafarullah Jamali and Finance Minister Shaukat Aziz.

He said the province had sought Rs7 billion from the federal government to accelerate development activities and urged it to play its role for securing a loan of Rs5 billion from the Asian Development Bank for the public sector development programme.

He said the provincial additional chief secretary, development, and finance and planning and development secretaries would meet the federal finance secretary on Monday in Islamabad to discuss the provision of funds.

Maulana Wasay said the provincial team, in its meeting with the finance minister, had stressed the need for changing the formula for the distribution of resources in the new National Finance Commission award but he said the other provinces were not ready for it.

He said the federal minister had been reminded that three provinces supported the proposal of distribution of half of the resources on population basis and the remaining on the basis of backwardness, area and revenue generation.

He said the discrimination in gas prices between the provinces should be removed.