Karachi
The assembly’s sitting on Friday was adjourned when the lawmakers of the opposition parties, the Pakistan Muslim League-Functional and the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, started protesting after being restrained from discussing the sugarcane support price.
The assembly sitting lasted only one and a half hours before its abrupt adjournment. Only the question hour on the katchi abadis and food departments could be finished.
The trouble started when food minister Jam Mehtab Hussain Dahar was responding to PML-F’s Nusrat Seher Abbasi question about the rate and quantity of wheat procured by the government from 2011 to 2013.
As a supplementary question, PML-N lawmaker Sorath Thebo asked the minister as to why the government had been unable to have its sugarcane procurement price of Rs182 per 40kg implemented – an issue that was causing immense problems for farmers.
The situation grew tense when opposition lawmaker and former chief minister Dr Arbab Ghulam Rahim also stood up and asked the same question.
Rahim, considered a staunch foe of the ruling Pakistan People’s Party, demanded stern action against the province’s sugarcane mill owners, holding them responsible for the farmers’ troubles.
The food minister responded that the provincial government was negotiating with the sugarcane mill owners in upper Sindh to resolve the issue.
He said the government was trying to sort out the issue in the rest of the province as well but the problem had unduly been politicised. The minister added that the problem had been further compounded after sugarcane mill owners moved the apex judiciary.
The food minister wanted to further elaborate on the issue, but education minister and PPP parliamentary leader Nisar Khuhro objected over the questions about the sugarcane procurement price. He said neither did the issue concern the main question, nor did the sugarcane price issue fall under the domain of the food
department. The education minister asked the deputy speaker to prohibit the questions on the sugarcane price as they were not allowed under the rules of the procedure of the provincial assembly.
Deputy speaker Shehla Raza ruled that these questions could be asked during another sitting in a question hour that pertained to the agriculture department.
When the PML-F and PML-N lawmakers stood up from their seats in protest, the deputy speaker asked them to calm down. However, the opposition lawmakers responded that there was for need for Khuhro to intervene when the deputy speaker had initially allowed their colleagues to ask supplementary questions on the sugarcane price issue.
The deputy speaker remarked that since the PPP had come into power in the province in 2008, it had substantially increased the support prices of important agricultural products in the interests of the growers.
But the protesting lawmakers were too charged up and some of them gathered around the deputy speaker’s rostrum, shouting slogans in protest.
The deputy speaker first announced the conclusion of the question hour for the day and later when the situation could not be controlled, adjourned the session till Monday.
Cotton and rice prices
Earlier, the food minister informed the lawmakers that the government had only fixed the support price for sugarcane.
The support prices of cotton and rice were still being fixed by the federal government despite the devolution of this power to the provinces under the 18th constitutional amendment.
During the question hour, katchi abadis minister Javed Nagori told the House that the provincial government had decided that those shanty dwellings where ambulances, fire tenders and police vans could not enter because of small and congested of the alleys would not be regularised.