Bilawal Bhutto asks Sindh government to work out poor-friendly budget

Pakistan Peoples Party Chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari has stressed the need for assigning priorities to the health and agriculture sectors in the 2020-21 budget of the Sindh government as “fighting coronavirus and locust attacks shall be the top-most agenda to save human lives and avert famine and food insecurity”.

During a briefing via video-conference by Sindh Chief Minister Murad Ali Shah, Coordinator to Chief Minister for Social Protection Haris Gazdar, Sindh Planning & Development Board Chairman Muhammad Waseem and Sindh Finance Secretary Syed Hassan Naqvi, the PPP chairman said on Sunday that Sindh had to prepare “a poor-friendly budget within the available resources to cater to the needs of the people in an era of multiple crises”.

The chief minister and his team apprised the PPP chairman of the additional fiscal allocations of the government for the COVID-19 response schemes, social protection and poverty reduction programmes so that “repercussions of COVID-19 and the locust attacks could be mitigated”.

The CM informed the Bilawal that the Sindh government had planned to extend subsidies to the small farmers on export quality rice seeds, fertilisers and pesticides to compensate the agriculture sector in the wake of locust attack.

Bilawal pointed out that the issue of the reduction of the federal transfers had harmed the provincial strategies during the current financial year as the province received Rs229 billion “less than its share of Rs835 billion” by the PTI’s federal government. “This is a great injustice to Sindh and other provinces,” he added.

The PPP chairman asked the chief minister and his team to formulate “a pro-people and pro-poor budget within their meagre resources and receipts due to COVID-19, locust attacks and the negligence-cum-incompetence of the federal government”.