KARACHI, Sept 7: The Public Accounts Committee of the Sindh Assembly on Friday decided to leave unsettled draft paras of audit reports of the fiscal years 2005 to 2009 in its report to be prepared and submitted before the provincial assembly.
The decision to leave unsettled audit paras was taken in view of the fact that the finance department could not regularise serious financial indiscipline for want of documents.
The PAC considered the deferred paras of the agriculture and the education and literacy departments in its meeting presided over by its chairman Sardar Jam Tamachi Unnar here.
It deferred consideration of the agriculture department as its secretary had gone abroad while an additional secretary did not come prepared to respond to the queries of the PAC.
In the education & literacy department, there were total 18 deferred draft paras from the audit reports for the year 2006 to 2009 involving a total amount of Rs345.185 million financial irregularities.
The PAC settled only three paras involving irregularities amounting to Rs1.66 million while 15 paras were deferred.
The meeting was attended by officials of the agriculture and education & literacy departments, MPAs Ghulam Mujadid Isran and Shoaib Ibrahim.
The PAC chief observed that the educational standard in Sindh used to be quite high and people from Punjab used to come to study here but after 1958 its deterioration started.
He said that the reason for the decline in the standard of education was due to a want of population-oriented development as the first census was carried out in 1971, followed by 1981 and in 1998.
He said that the population-oriented budget was a basic requirement to have its impact on social services.
He said instead of setting up schools in every village without taking into consideration its minimum population standard, the development expenditure spent on the buildings and providing infrastructure could not serve the purpose.
He said that there was a need to fix minimum population criteria before declaring any locality as a village. If the government formulated a policy in this regard huge funds could be saved from wastage which could be utilised for providing better social services to the people, he added.