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Friday March 29, 2024

‘Sindh received Rs75 billion less from Centre this financial year too’

By Our Correspondent
March 28, 2018

The Sindh government in the current year too has received Rs75 billion less from the federal government than what the actual share of the province was in the federal divisible pool, causing serious problems with carrying out development projects in the province.

Sindh Development and Planning Minister Saeed Ghani stated this while speaking at a press conference on Tuesday. He told journalists about the Sindh Development Forum-2018 being organised by the provincial government on Wednesday. Representatives of foreign donor agencies will attend the important event.

The minister claimed that the government in the current financial year had spent a greater volume of the budget as compared to the previous fiscal year in order to carry out development works in the province.

He said the Sindh government of the Pakistan Peoples Party since its inception in the year 2008 had built roads having a total length of 13,625 kilometres -- 7,340 kilometres of new roads and the repair and maintenance of existing roads having a total length of 6,177 kilometres.

He said that the government since 2008 had conceived 1,597 new development schemes pertaining to road infrastructure and out of them 1,390 had been completed while work on 205 schemes was continuing.

The minister added that 41 development schemes had been identified in the budget of the current financial year, and 22 of them had been completed while the rest would be completed by June 2018.

He said the government had been spending an additional amount of Rs10 billion every year on the completion of development schemes meant for Karachi.

Saeed Ghani said the Sindh government had spent a total of Rs140 billion on the development of road projects in the province.

He said that further funding for new road projects was stopped by provincial government in case state of their work was found unsatisfactory on the report submitted by the monitoring and evaluation cell of the department.

He said the government for the first time since the year 1991 had launched a “Karachi Neighbourhood Improvement Project” for the uplift, development and beautification of localities of old city areas with the cooperation of the World Bank.

He said the union council-based poverty reduction programme was also being run by the Planning and Development Department in Sindh and it had helped a lot in furthering the cause of poverty alleviation in less developed areas of the province.

The provincial minister, under the Public-Private Partnership programme, had completed a number of development projects in the province, including the Karachi-Thatta Dual Carriageway, Jhirk Mulla Katiar Bridge, Hyderabad-Mirpurkhas Dual carriageway and Islamkot Airport.

He nullified the impression that public-oriented development schemes were launched by the provincial government as general elections in the country were now just a few months away. Rather, he said, only such development schemes were being completed which were duly included in the Annual Development Programme of the Sindh government as given in the budget.