KARACHI: Leader of the Opposition in the Sindh Assembly Haleem Adil Sheikh on Saturday said the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) government was deliberately holding back wheat stocks in public warehouses to create artificial shortage of the grain in open market and cause sudden hike in flour price.

Mr Sheikh told a press conference at his office in the Sindh Assembly that the PPP planned to derive political mileage out of the price hike of the staple food by blaming it on the federal government.

He ruled out any possibility of shortage of wheat in Sindh and said it was “ruling mafia” and “feudal class” in the garb of farmers, who were receiving higher price for the grain from the millers due to their nexus with the government and at the same time supporting the PPP’s political narrative of shortage of the grain, which was in reality artificial.

“Being so-called champion of democracy and sympathiser of the poor, is it not high time PPP chairman Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari explained why flour price in Sindh was higher than it was in Punjab?” he asked.

“We demand the Sindh government start releasing wheat from warehouses to the market at the earliest and ensure its availability at reasonable rates to save masses from the engineered inflation.

“It’s an open secret and everyone living in Sindh knows well that people have to buy wheat flour at exorbitant rates because of widespread corruption of the PPP government,” he said.

He referred to price of wheat flour in Sindh, which stood at Rs75 per kilo as against Rs58 a kilo in Punjab and said “nothing but only corruption of billions of rupees in Sindh food department is the reason behind this huge difference in flour prices in the two provinces.

“About 1.2 million tonnes wheat is stocked with food department but the provincial government is not releasing it, forcing flour mills to buy the grain at expensive price in open market. The mills, on an average, are right now buying the grain at Rs3,000 per 40 kg and consequently selling the flour at higher prices,” he said.

Sheikh shared data of the provincial food department where, he claimed, billions of rupees had been embezzled as “customary annual practice” and said one of the usual pretexts cited by the authorities to misappropriate huge wheat stocks was to declare the grain rotten and nibbled by rats. Rs14 billion worth wheat in godowns was embezzled in this way, he said.

“The saga of corruption doesn’t end here. The wheat also is released against bogus cheques and it is all happening in the [food] department which is under burden of Rs150 billion debt it had obtained from private banks for wheat procurement but failed to pay back.

“A system of check and balance is non-existent in Sindh and price control committees are dormant because the PPP itself is patronising this corrupt system. Now, this system is geared to create an artificial crisis of wheat flour in the province,” he said.

He pointed out a “new but growing system of corruption in Karachi” which saw the PPP busy in grabbing state land worth billions of rupees in connivance with and active official support of land mafia through government machinery.

“As part of a bigger plan, first revenue record was set ablaze in district West Karachi, and they never hesitate to raze villages and abodes of the poor in the name of removal of encroachments. But this time we will not allow an easy sail to the PPP. We will resist every illegal move of this government and expose every instance of its corruption,” he said.

Published in Dawn, October 10th, 2021