KARACHI, June 7: The Pakistan People’s Party on Wednesday condemned the federal budget 2006-07 as anti-poor, inflationary and based on false claims’.

In a statement issued here on Wednesday, the party’s Central Information Secretary Ms Sherry Rehman claimed that “the budget is full of paradoxes as instead of providing relief to a nation that is witnessing economic suicides for the first time in the history, the regime is refusing to cut its expenditures, which benefit the huge civil and defence machineries.”

It has failed to address the growing level of poverty. “Of what use is the 15 per cent pay raise for a government servant, or the fixing of minimum wage at Rs4,000 for a worker when 70 per cent of the country’s population earns not more than $2 (or Rs120) a day?” she asked. “Who is going to buy moong pulse from a handful of utility stores in the country… and who is going to find a price magistrate in a district of over one million people?”

When prices of sugar have quadrupled in five years, the government protects the sugar barons who are its ministers, she wondered.

She pointed out that the NAB was used to persecute political opponents and institute false cases against Ms Benazir Bhutto, and asked: “Why have the NAB’s expenditures spiralled up to Rs797 billion? Does it really need to spend Rs2.1 million a day and Rs25 million a year on foreign trips?”

She alleged that the regime was also juggling figures and inflating the new per capita figure of $847 by artificially lowering the population growth rate to 1.2 per cent. How has the population growth rate suddenly gone down from 2.6 per cent when all independent estimates project it at as much higher than the new official figure?

According to Ms Rehman, one of the biggest lies being peddled to the people is about the end of government borrowing to sustain its expenses. In fact, the regime had claimed last year that the ‘begging bowl’ had been broken by paying of the debts and doing away with dependence on aid. So, can it explain the new World Bank loan of $6.5 billion is what the government is congratulating itself on? Pakistan is now securely in the grip of a debt cycle that has never been witnessed before.

The PPP leader claimed that the military rulers, like the Gen Zia regime, had taken loans from the commercial market at much higher interest rates than the IMF ever gave. “If you look at the fine print in the Economic Survey, you can see that even for this year, the external debts and liabilities have gone up to $36.557 billion over the first nine months of the current fiscal, already showing a rise of 0.723 billion. And none of these rises ever went through parliament as the Fiscal Responsibility Law brought in implied.” said Ms Rehman.

Because of this profligacy in government borrowing, foreign debt servicing has also gone up from Rs45 billion to Rs48 .7 billion. So all foreign debt trends in absolute terms show an upward trend. Domestic debt has also gone up to reach the height of Rs58.8 billion from the last year’s budgeted figure of Rs34.1 billion. This represents a high jump in the borrowings, she argued.

As for its trumpeting on foreign investment, she said privatisation was the only source of the small-scale foreign investment. She termed the privatisation process ‘non-transparent’ and ‘controversial’, indicating that the KESC could no longer supply power to Karachi; the Steel Mill privatisation had been stayed by the Supreme Court; and the PTCL and MCB still remained challenged by their workers over retrenchment.

For the first time in the history of Pakistan, she claimed, the proceeds from privatisation of the state’s assets were being spent on meeting budget deficits. Last year’s non-transparent sale of such assets generated Rs90 billion and the amount was used to finance the president’s bullet-proof car and meet the expenses of Rs0.8 million a day of the President’s House. “No elected government can afford to utilise the privatisation proceeds like this,” she remarked.