RAWALPINDI: The Rawalpindi Municipal Corporation (RMC) has halted the process to award development schemes worth Rs150 million that were recently approved by its elected members after the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) banned new schemes as the general elections approached.

However, the RMC has sought permission of the ECP to carry out repair and maintenance work on roads, streets and other schemes till the general elections.

The ECP issued a notification on April 11 and asked all government departments not to launch any new development scheme in their respective areas or make any recruitment to avoid any allegation of election rigging.

Decision taken after ECP stopped govt depts from initiating new projects to avoid allegation of rigging in general elections

“After receiving the directives, we stopped the process of new development schemes which were supposed to be launch this month. We had got approval of elected representatives of the RMC to launch projects worth Rs150 million,” Mayor Sardar Naseem told Dawn.

He said a letter had been written to the ECP to allow the civic body to carry out repair and maintenance work in the city areas.

He said the RMC wanted to spend Rs100 million on the improvement of facilities at the general bus stand in Pirwadhai, construct streets, roads and drains in union councils.

He said other projects would be launched after the 2018 elections scheduled to be held in July.

He said the RMC launched development schemes worth Rs1.87 billion in the current fiscal year which was higher than the previous years.

“The RMC earned Rs220 million extra from commercialisation fee against the target of Rs20 million. We also earned money from tax on transfer of unmovable property. As we started giving incentives, more people paid taxes without any hurdles and we collected Rs135 million till April 1,” he said.

To a question, he said work on the ongoing schemes would continue as the ECP had stopped only those projects which were supposed to be started after April 1.

“We have asked the contractors to complete the development schemes as soon as possible.”

The mayor said the PML-N government had provided development funds to all the union councils without any discrimination.

“We provided equal funds to the PPP, PTI and Awami Muslim League Union Council chairmen for their six union councils,” he said.

Published in Dawn, April 16th, 2018