KARACHI: While the Pakistan Peoples Party has been accusing Punjab of stealing Sindh’s water, Pak Sarzameen Party chairman Syed Mustafa Kamal alleged on Saturday that the ruling party in the province was not taking any measures to overcome water shortages in Karachi as it had failed to increase the water share of the metropolis even by a single drop during its 13-year rule.

Talking to reporters after his appearance in an accountability court, he said Sindh got 36,370 million gallons of water daily from the Indus River System Authority and only 540mgd that constitutes just 1.5 per cent of Sindh’s water share was being supplied to Karachi.

He said the PPP-led Sindh government did not add even a single drop to Karachi’s water share during its 13 years of consecutive rule, ignoring the fact that about 50pc of the total population of Sindh lived in the metropolis.

Mr Kamal said if there was agriculture [in the interior of Sindh], millions of industrial units were functioning in the provincial metropolis and the city’s water demand had increased manifold. “If PPP chairman Bilawal Bhutto really feels for Sindh, he must stop discriminatory treatment with urban Sindh’s population,” he said.

Fake domiciles

The PSP chief said that the “biased” Sindh government was completely ignoring the youth of urban Sindh by violating the decades-long rural-urban job quota in the province under which 40pc jobs must be given to the residents of Karachi, Hyderabad and Sukkur.

“The constitutionally allotted 40pc quota for urban Sindh is also not being implemented and jobs allocated for urban Sindh have been snatched through fake domiciles,” he said.

He said the Sindh government had given 200,000 government jobs in which the rights of the people of Sindh were severely violated.

He said there were no jobs for the youths of Karachi, Hyderabad and Mirpurkhas as non-locals on the basis of fake domiciles of urban parts of Sindh had been illegally appointed. “The unjust action of the PPP is causing severe damage to the country and the province,” he said.

Commenting on the Sindh government’s actions to impose a lockdown on the pretext of stopping the spread of the coronavirus, he said industries were being shifted to countries such as Bangladesh, where they were given fair opportunities, and a level playing field.

He said Sindh government officials from the rural areas of the province “made Karachi a conquered zone as bribes are being taken from an entire market by sealing one shop. Millions of rupees are being taken daily from Karachi traders as a bribe”.

He said the PPP and the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf were united when it came to destroying Karachi.

Published in Dawn, May 30th, 2021