Lawmakers concerned over power cuts in Karachi

Karachi
In the proceedings of the fifth consecutive sitting of the provincial assembly on Saturday to discuss the next fiscal year’s budget, both the treasury and opposition sides expressed their concerns over the increasing power outages in the province, especially in Karachi, during Ramazan.
Muttahida Qaumi Movement MPA Khawaja Izhar-ul-Hassan, the leader of the opposition in the House, drew the speaker’s attention towards the worsening power crisis in Karachi.
Hassan pointed out that on Friday, the first day of Ramazan, around 70 percent areas of Karachi were without electricity.
He added that he had read the statements of the prime minister, the Sindh chief minister and the water and power state minister on the crisis, but wanted to know as to whether or not any provincial minister had spoken with the K-Electric about the issue.
He said the government should inform the masses about power overload issue so that they could understand the reason behind their suffering.
Speaker Agha Siraj Durrani said power shortage had become a major problem as his own house had been without electricity for 10 hours on the first day of Ramazan since sehri.
Finance and energy minister Murad Ali Shah said the electricity crisis had alarmingly grown worse in the province in the last two months.
He added that he and former president Asif Ali Zardari had written letters to the federal government on the issue, but the Centre was not paying any heed to this pressing problem.
“The federal authorities have been claiming that electricity production has increased, but the crisis has grown worse instead of showing any improvement.”
He said a joint resolution would be moved in the provincial assembly to express concern over the power issue and if the need arose, a protest would also be launched.
Budget debate
Earlier, opposition lawmakers while participating in the discussion on the new provincial budget described it as a “pack of lies” that offered nothing to the residents of both the urban and rural areas of the province.
The treasury lawmakers belonging to the Pakistan People’s Party defended the budget saying that despite facing a constant deficit of receivables from the federal government, the provincial administration was doing its best to allocate maximum resources for development schemes in both the rural and urban areas.
Speaking on the budget, MQM lawmaker Dr Zafar Kamali alleged that the frequent inclusion and expulsion of development schemes proposed by lawmakers in every successive provincial budget had given rise to the impression that there was some kind of divide among PPP lawmakers themselves - one group of legislators trying to outsmart the other by using their clout in the government.
Kamali said his constituency was located in Mirpurkhas town where the proposed development schemes - the construction of trauma centre, a women poly-technical college and an overhead bridge - should be completed at the earliest.
Dr Seema Zia of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf said the provincial government from the next financial year should introduce a biometric attendance system for its employees and a proper system of tracking and management of the vast fleet of official vehicles to prevent losses to the provincial exchequer.
Muhammad Dilawar of the MQM said 90 percent of all important offices and installations of the provincial government were located in the Saddar zone of Karachi’s South district where civic services were in a pathetic state, particularly the sewerage system.
He noted that the sewerage system in the South district had dilapidated and no steps had been taken to revamp it for the last several decades.
Dr Arshad Abdullah Vohra of the MQM said advertising billboards had cropped up on almost every road, street, footpath and greenbelt of Karachi, generating massive revenue for the Karachi Municipal Corporation, but these proceeds were not being used for the provision of necessary equipment and medicines to the hospitals run by the city’s authorities.
Nand Kumar of the Pakistan Muslim League-Functional said poverty, unemployment, hunger and other socio-economic problems had been plaguing Sindh, but the provincial government was constantly increasing non-development expenditures in its budget.
Uproar in House
The lawmakers of the ruling PPP and the opposition PML-F became engaged in a verbal spar when anti-corruption, mines, and minerals minister Manzoor Hussain Wassan was speaking on the budget.
The minister said the PML-F lawmakers who were now on the opposition benches had been speaking against corruption, but the party itself was involved in extortion cases, illegal allotment of public land and other corrupt practices when it was part of the government during Gen (retd) Pervez Musharraf’s era.
He said millions of rupees had extorted from the managements of three gas fields in the Khairpur district and feared that this money could be used for destabilising Karachi.
He added that 16,000 acres had been distributed among landless women in Khairpur by the late Benazir Bhutto in 1995 when she was in power, but when the PML-F became part of the ruling coalition, it had the leases cancelled and the land was distributed among PML-F activists and supporters.
Wassan said the PML-F lawmakers were now paying tribute to NAB, the FIA, and Rangers for taking action against corrupt bureaucrats in Sindh, but these federal agencies should also launch a investigation into the party’s lawmakers and former ministers’ corrupt practices when they were in power.
Later, the speaker adjourned the house till Monday and also informed the lawmakers that an additional day would be reserved for continuing the debate on the new provincial budget on which the treasury side would respond to the opposition’s budget speeches.