PM greets Dar for presenting pro-growth budget

ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has felicitated federal minister for Finance Senator Muhammad Ishaq Dar for producing pro-growth budget for next fiscal year.

The Prime Minister House issued a statement on behalf of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on Saturday evening indicating rich tribute from the prime minister for his finance minister in this regard.  The message says that, “I appreciate and compliment Finance Minister Ishaq Dar and his team for presenting a pro growth budget for the next financial year.”

He reminded that the government has worked tirelessly in the past three years to improve the lives of the average Pakistani and stabilise a nation in tatters.

“We inherited hyperinflation and financial indiscipline of the highest degree, inhibiting the working class from living lives of dignity, and turned things around to cut our deficit in half, grow the GDP at a 4.7% per-annul rate, improve our balance of trade, bring inflation down to a ten year low and bring tax collection up to historic levels,” Prime Minster Nawaz said.

He said that none of this could have been possible if our budget had not mirrored our vision for the country and what we know it has the potential to be. “In the next fiscal year, we have committed to not only replicate this success, but one-up it. We have chosen to invest in important project Gwadar, a port with increasing international importance with China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) on the horizon.

We have created new subsidies and public investment in agriculture to help our agro-economy and the millions of Pakistanis who depend on its success for a living. We have also committed to investing in infrastructure, roads, railways and the Karachi-Lahore motorway, making us more connected than ever and creating thousands of direct and indirect jobs. After the Paris climate change agreement, we have committed ourselves to recognise the existential threat it poses to our security and the future of our children and are investing over a billion rupees in our climate change division to make sure we don’t gamble with the future of the world. We have increased our allocations in social welfare cash grants programmes like BISP, to make sure that millions of poor people, regardless of their income, can live lives of dignity and can break the shackles of poverty,” he added.

The prime minister said that “finally, we have also invested in numerous power projects across the country, to develop a country where livelihoods are no longer dependent on the whims of power outages. There is nothing wrong in our country that can’t be fixed with what is right in country, and that is exactly our plan”, Nawaz Sharif concluded .