No relief for virus, poverty-hit people: Siraj

LAHORE: Jamaat-e-Islami Ameer Senator Sirajul Haq has said the federal budget was prepared on IMF dictation, having no relief for the coronavirus and poverty-hit masses.

In his response to the budget on Friday, he said the minister in the National Assembly had read out the accounting statement prepared by the international lending agency for the next financial year. It was an exercise describing the PTI government had neither achieved anything in the past year, nor developed a plan to provide any relief to common man during 2020-21. The Imran Khan government, he added, failed to achieve financial targets for the previous year, putting blame of its incompetency on cronavirus outbreak. He said it was fact that the country’s economy had almost collapsed under the umbrella of the PTI government even before the outbreak of Covid-19 in March.

He said the government had not introduced any major programme of public welfare in the budget. The allocations for the federal and provincial development projects, he added, were meagre which also included a major component of foreign loans. He also described the funds announced for the development of the tribal region as nothing when one compared it with the lack of infrastructure and unavailability of basic human needs in the area.

He criticised the rulers for not providing enough resources to the locust-hit agriculture sector. He said the allocations for the health and education sector were not according to the expectations of the people.