MULTAN City News

Automobile manufacturing policy draft criticised

From Our Correspondent

MULTAN: The vending sector of the automobiles in the country has criticized the draft of the automobile policy-II, terming it one-sided and against wishes of all stake-holders that protects only interests of assemblers not manufacturers.

Talking to reporters at the Multan Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the MCCI former president Mian Iqbal Hassan and acting president Atta Shafi Tanvir Sheikh said the automobiles vending sector had already collapsed and auto policy would be a big blow to the remaining engineering industries in future.

They said this policy is only for assemblers, saying that import duties on assembled, SKD,CKD, their parts, accessories and assemblies are lowest in the region resulting huge loss of revenue to the state in hundreds of billions rupees.

The import duties vary from zero to 32.5 per cent which will be farther reduced to 10 per cent, they said.

Mian said the country’s imports were alarmingly increasing.

About automobile manufacturing policy, he said it is a conspiracy against Pakistan so that it may not develop to manufacturing-based economy.

They said Japanese companies are not interested to give-up their monopoly which they are maintaining for the last 32 years. Japan is directly intervening in the auto-policy-II through its government. It is to be noted that in the last 1st Auto-Policy 2006-12 targets of producing 500,000 cars in the country was fixed.

Mian said no visible progress is visible in this sector and there is no manufacturing programme in the next 5 to10 years.

He claimed that it is incorrect that over 70 per cent cars and 90 per cent tractors are produced in the country.