Rs33 billion federally funded projects being built in city: governor

Sindh Governor Imran Ismail has said that the federal government in the current year is going to complete development projects of Rs33 billion in Karachi out of the Rs162 billion special package earlier announced for the city by the prime minister.

Speaking at a press conference here on Friday, he said that Prime Minister Imran Khan in September this year would inaugurate a number of these development projects after their completion. The federally funded under-construction projects included three flyovers in District Central, reconstruction of Manghopir Road, Nishtar Road, establishing 200 reverse osmosis water filtration plants, and bringing 500 buses to the city.

He said that efforts were under way to complete the Green Line section of Bus Rapid Transit Service in Karachi by the end of current year as Rs2 billion had been reserved for the purpose in the new federal budget.

The governor said that the Sindh chief minister during the last press conference had wrongly assumed that there had been no progress to materialise the recently announced Rs 162 billion special development package for the city. He said that the federal government would start work on the Hyderabad-Sukkur section of the motorway at a cost of Rs250 billion.

He also rejected the claim of the CM that the federal government had committed discrimination against Sindh as a number of its development schemes had been deleted from the Public Sector Development Programme, while other provinces had not been treated in such a discriminatory manner.

He said that total volume of the PSDP of the federal government had shrunk to Rs675 billion from the previous development portfolio of Rs800 billion owing to which a number of development projects had been affected all over the country.

Ismail said that merely 10 percent of development projects of Sindh had been affected due to the decrease in the volume of the PSDP.

He said that Sindh had received Rs332 billion from the Centre as oil and gas royalty in the last t10 years. He said that despite getting so much money from the Centre, the Sindh government had failed to develop a single city as a model.

He reiterated the resolve of the federal government to run three major public sector hospitals in Karachi whose control had been recently transferred back to the Centre in accordance with a court order.

The governor said the provincial government should no more worry about these three hospitals in Karachi and instead it should focus on improving the state of the rest of the government-run health institutions in Sindh.

He reiterated his announcement that a forensic audit would be conducted of the accounts of the three major hospitals in the city and whosoever was found involved in corruption, cases against them would be sent to the National Accountability Bureau.

He said the Sindh government had the right to introduce reforms in the working of the provincial police force, but under the same authority, the basic policing system should not be damaged. He said the role of the inspector general of police in the new police law passed by the Sindh Assembly had been confined to that of a postman and that was why he returned the newly passed bill to the provincial assembly for reconsideration without assenting it after raising objections.

The governor said the federal government would assist wherever the Sindh government wanted its intervention for the sake of the development of the province. He added that the federal government had been providing utmost assistance to tackle the recent outbreak of an HIV/AIDS epidemic in Sindh.