MANSEHRA: The nazims and naib nazims of village and neighbourhood councils on Thursday announced that they would protest the provincial government’s failure to release their budgetary allocations for the current financial year even after the passage of the first quarter.

“The nazims, naib nazims and councillors from across Mansehra district will protest outside the offices of the local government department’s assistant director here on Oct 30 against the denial of development and non-development budget for the current fiscal,” Nazmeen Ittehad president Mohammad Fareed told a meeting here.

The participants, including nazims of 194 village and neighbourhood councils, said the PTI government in the province wanted to destroy the local government system as it hadn’t released a single penny from the allocated funds to Mansehra’s village and neighbourhood councils even four months after the start of the current financial year.

Nazmeen Ittehad general secretary Basharat Ali Swati said the denial of funds could stop local bodies from functioning but the councillors won’t allow that to happen and would take to the streets to claim rights bestowed under the Local government Act, 2013.

Insist PTI govt hasn’t released a single penny to village, neighbourhood councils in current fiscal

He said it was ironic that the assistant director’s office in Mansehra unduly delayed the dispatch of the reports on the use of annual development programme funds by village and neighbourhood councils to the local government department for evaluation.

“The assistant director’s office recently sent the department our ADP progress reports for the last fiscal though four months of the current one have already passed,” he said.

MURDER CASE: The Darband police on Thursday booked three people on the charge of killing a woman relative earlier this week in Karoro Dogha area of Oghi tehsil.

Police investigation officer Qamar Zaman told reporters that Ghulam Jan had lodged an FIR claiming his unmarried niece, Aasma Bibi, had committed suicide by firing gunshots at her, but the postmortem report revealed that the woman was murdered.

He said the police had booked the complainant and two other family members of the deceased, Mohammad Shaukat and Taj Mohammad, on murder charge.

The official said the investigation was under way to know the exact reason behind the murder.

Published in Dawn, October 27th, 2017