Ensuring law and order top priority, CM assures PA

Responding to an allegation raised by an opposition lawmaker about worsened peace situation in the province despite spending billions of rupees from the public exchequer on security, Sindh Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah on Monday assured the Sindh Assembly that maintenance of law and order situation was one of the foremost priorities of his government.

The CM, who also holds the portfolio of the provincial home department, was responding to the call-attention notice of Grand Democratic Alliance (GDA) MPA Nand Kumar Goklani on the worsening law and order situation in the province where criminal activities by armed dacoits were on the rise.

The GDA lawmaker said the armed robbers in the riverine belt of Sindh had been on an unchecked crime spree despite the fact that Rs120 billion were spent every year by the government to maintain law and order.

Shah told the House that recently a police contingent was participating in an operation to secure the freedom of persons abducted by armed dacoits in Ghotki and the ensuing encounter resulted in the martyrdom of five police officers and personnel. He said the armed dacoits had martyred the policemen in retaliation as earlier their accomplice had been killed in an encounter.

He said that one of the suspects belonging to the gang of dacoits involved in the policemen’s martyrdom had been killed by the police. The CM assured the assembly that the provincial police had been daringly performing its duties to get rid of the gangs of armed robbers.

He added that in the last year, 29 armed dacoits were killed in Shikarpur and 63 abducted persons released, while 23 robbers were killed by the police in Kashmore.

He recalled that back in 2007, an army’s escort was compulsory if a convoy of civilians had to move from Sukkur to Lakhi, Shikarpur, due to the troubled law and order situation but now, there was no such “no-go area” in Sindh.

Later the opposition legislators belonging to the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf staged a walkout from the House as their fellow legislator Dr Imran Ali Shah was denied the permission to present his call-attention notice on the recently surfaced multi-million scam related to the construction of the Hyderabad-Sukkur Motorway.

Speaker Agha Siraj Khan Durrani ruled that 30 minutes of the session reserved for the call-attention notices had been exhausted so the PTI legislator could not be allowed to present his notice. Meanwhile, the CM told the House that the current session of the assembly from next week would hold a discussion on the recent situation of the flood calamity in the province.

Arabic teachers

Sindh Education Minister Syed Sardar Ali Shah told the assembly that 480 posts of schoolteachers of the Arabic language were vacant in the province and they would be filled soon. He was responding to a call-attention notice of a Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP) MPA, Mufti Qasim Fakhri, on the shortage of Arabic language schoolteachers in Sindh. He lamented that the Sindh government had started recruitment of music teachers for the schools but no attention was being paid to overcome the shortage of Arabic schoolteachers in the province. Assuring the TLP MPA of filling the vacancies of Arabic schoolteachers, the education minister also remarked that music should not be associated with immorality as earlier schools used to have bandmasters.