MQM-P continues protest against lack of urban centres’ share in budget

The Muttahida Quami Movement-Pakistan lawmakers on Friday continued their protest outside the Sindh Assembly building against the provincial government for the second day for ignoring the province’s urban centres, particularly Karachi, in the budget for the financial year 2020-21.

Sindh Assembly Opposition leader Firdous Shamim Naqvi, traders’ leader Sheikh Habib and other political and civil society figures joined the protest to show solidarity with the demonstrators, while Sindh ministers Syed Nasir Hussain Shah, Saeed Ghan and Imtiaz Shiekh visited the camp to listen to the party’s grievances.

Holding banners and placards, the MQM-P lawmakers shouted slogans against the provincial government for non-provision of water and other civic facilities to the residents of Karachi.

Speaking at the protest sit-in, MQM-P parliamentary leader Kunwar Naveed Jameel rejected the Sindh government’s budget and alleged that the provincial government had shown ethnic bias against urban centres in the allocation of funds in the budget.

He claimed that the development schemes envisaged for the city in the previous financial years had been abandoned by the provincial government before their completion. He said the provincial government had completely failed to ensure water supply for people of Karachi amid the peak summer season.

He said Karachi, a city that was paying the highest amount of taxes, was not getting its due share in the provincial budget which was a continuation of the Pakistan Peoples Party’s (PPP) policies of overlooking the urban centres of the province.

The MQM-P leader said Karachi contributed around 65 per cent of the total revenue to the federation and 90 per cent to the province, but in return, it hardly got anything from the ruling centres. “In the past 12 years, the Sindh government did not initiate a single project of public transport for the city,” he said.