LAHORE: Federal Minister for Planning, Development and Special Initiatives Ahsan Iqbal has said Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) Chairman and former prime minister Imran Khan is trying to create unrest and polarisation through hybrid warfare tools, but the coalition government would not allow anyone to destabilise the country.

He was addressing the groundbreaking ceremony of the Higher Education Commission-Seerat Centre for Gender Studies and Rights of Women.

He said the coalition government would believe in democracy and the provision of fundamental rights to people and it would not hinder any peaceful demonstrations, adding that strict action would be taken against the people who would try to create anarchy and take the law into their hands.

The minister said that PTI social media teams were propagating about the caretaker setup to create confusion among the masses, however, the government would decide on the election date after taking all stakeholders on board.

He said they had planned to set up nine special economic zones till 2020 during their previous tenure, but the PTI government neglected the sector and did not establish even a single economic zone till 2022.

He said that the PTI government also ignored Gwadar port development, including the port dragging process, which was part of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor as they did not clear the financial bills and also not provided other resources needed to develop the port.

He said Seerat Centre would focus on how to counter the challenge of hate speech and Islamophobia through the development of research-based culture in the study of Islam.

He criticised the previous government’s performance on the development front, saying its “failures and inability to decrease the deficit” had led to a reduction in the uplift budget’s size.

The minister said the Public Sector Development Programme was initially allocated Rs900 billion for the current fiscal year 2021-22, which had now been reduced to Rs480 billion.

He said the National Highways Authority was given Rs319 billion in the fiscal year 2019 and they now required Rs460 billion, but their budget had been reduced to Rs91 billion by the PTI government.

He said that the government would have to restore targets from the previous fiscal year for reducing the deficit in the new budget.

He said that the government would also face other constraints, including conditions set by the IMF, but it would try to increase the development budget as much as it could while maintaining financial discipline.

Published in Dawn,May 24th, 2022