Govt doesn’t have resources to rebuild monsoon rain-hit urban areas, MQM-P tells PA

The opposition Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan has lamented in the Sindh Assembly that the provincial government does not have financial resources to rebuild the infrastructure of urban areas after the devastation caused by last year’s heavy monsoon rains.

Taking part in the pre-budget discussion in the house on Thursday, parliamentary party leader of the MQM in the Sindh Assembly, Kanwar Naveed Jameel, said that the Sindh government did not have any interest to resolve the problems of the people of Karachi.

He said the Sindh government’s only interest was that whosever visited Karachi from abroad should see fancy signboards and traffic signals on main roads of the city. The MQM-P legislator said the people duly paid service charges to the Karachi Water & Sewerage Board, but even then they did not get the tap water. He said the affected residents had to purchase water from the tanker service for their household needs.

The Sindh Education Department was able to spend merely 27 per cent of its development budget, he said, adding that 17 development schemes had been continuing for the past eight years.

PTI MPA Khurrum Sher Zaman said the regime of Prime Minister Imran Khan had been busy in constructing dams and “Langar Khana” to feed the poor people. He said the Pakistan Stock Exchange and industries in Pakistan had been progressing well during the present regime.

PTI lawmaker Firdous Shamim Naqvi said the Sindh government had miserably failed to fulfil

its promise to launch public bus service in Karachi. He said street crimes had emerged as the major problem in Karachi, whereas the law and order situation in rest of the province had also been unsatisfactory.

An MPA of the opposition Grand Democratic Alliance, Arif Mustafa Jatoi, said the PPP’s regime in Sindh despite being in power for over a decade had failed to properly build the province. He said the people had to hire ambulances on their own to transport patients from other districts to major public sector hospitals in Karachi.

The GDA lawmaker said he had the desire to visit the Gorakh Hill Station along with his family, but it seemed that the project would not be completed in the remaining part of his life. Auqaf and Irrigation Minister Sohail Anwar Khan Siyal said the PPP government, since the financial year 2011-13, had been making proper allocations in the budget to properly manage 82 mosques and 72 religious shrines under the administrative control of the department. He said that earlier public donations had been raised to do the task.

He said personnel of the Auqaf Department regularly got their salaries like in the case of employees of other departments of the government. PPP MPA Siraj Qasim Soomro said personnel of the health, police and revenue departments had been working as the frontline workers in the battle against the coronavirus infection since last year. He said several staffers of these departments of the government providing essential services had lost their lives in the line of duty due to the coronavirus pandemic.