Sindh to continue fight against coronavirus despite defamation campaign: info minister

Regardless of the attempts to defame and criticise it, the Sindh government will continue to take the precautionary steps what it deems necessary to safeguard the human lives in the fight against the coronavirus, said Sindh Information and Local Government minister Syed Nasir Hussain Shah on Monday.

He was addressing a press conference and was accompanied by Sindh Agriculture Minister Muhammad Ismail Rahoo. The information minister said a propaganda campaign was being spearheaded on social media to discredit the Sindh government for its actions against the spread of the coronavirus. He said the government made decisions to save the people from the threat of the coronavirus.

He said all the safety acts of the Sindh government against the threat of the COVID-19 had conformed with the advice of the medical experts.

The minister said the government was being maligned in a planned manner, adding that “only Sindh is being focused by media”. “Is the lockdown only being observed in Sindh?” he asked.

He quoted the announcement made by Federal Planning and Development Minister Asad Umar on April 14 that there would be a countrywide lockdown in until May 9. “But now he [the federal minister)] is saying that this decision has led to an economic loss in the country,” Nasir said.

He said the federal government didn’t come to the support of the provincial government in its efforts to curb coronavirus spread and save the crops from the locust attack.

Speaking on the occasion, agriculture minister Ismail Rahoo said an imminent threat of the locus attack on crops was a serious issue that could lead to a situation of food insecurity in the country.

He said locusts were present on some 300,000 square kilometres area in the province as 35 per cent of such affected land was in Sindh. Rahoo said the locusts could cause massive damage to the agricultural in the districts of Tharparkar, Mirpurkhas, Sanghar, and Nawabshah.

He said the provincial government had been asking the federal government to take action against the threat of the locusts for one year.

Last year, he added, crops on hundreds of thousands of agricultural lands in 15 districts of the province had been damaged due to the locust attack as “this year the threat could be more devastating”.