KARACHI, June 27: City Nazim Syed Mustafa Kamal will present the city government’s surplus budget for the financial year 2008-09 in the City Council session on Saturday.

According to sources, the total outlay of the city government’s budget is Rs37.069 billion out of which over Rs18 billion have been earmarked for the development expenditures. No new tax has been levied in the budget.

On April 24, the city government presented Rs47.552 billion surplus draft budget for the fiscal year 2008-09 before the City Council and the budget reserved for the Karachi Water and Sewerage Board was Rs10.642 billion. On May 5, the City Council approved the final draft budget in which the expected receipts were standing at Rs47.6 billion as against the total expenditure of Rs47.5 billion.

Since the KWSB is now under the direct control of the Sindh government, the amount earmarked for the KWSB in the draft budget has been separated from the final budget, the sources said.

The city government earmarked around Rs1 billion in the budget for a 20 per cent increase in the salaries of its employees. The sources said that the city government would spend a major chunk of the development budget in social sector that include healthcare facilities, education, recreational and other uplift projects.

A senior official of the city government’s finance and planning department told Dawn that it was very difficult to prepare a surplus budget for the next fiscal year as the city government was facing severe problems due to a massive cut in octroi, zila tax and transfer of funds for provincial annual development programme by the Sindh government. It may be recalled here that the outlay of the city government’s surplus budget for the current fiscal year 2007-08 was Rs45.479 billion.

The official, however, said that the city government would face no financial problem as the federal government was likely to announce a special package for Karachi. “A special meeting of the federal cabinet will be held in the first week of July which may approve the special package for the city,” he added.