MQM-P team meets PM, promises support for budget approval

ISLAMABAD: A delegation of Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan (MQM-P) called on Prime Minister Imran Khan on Friday and assured him of party’s support for the budget approval.

The delegation included Minister for Information Technology Aminul Haq, Senator Faisal Sabzwari, Khalid Maqbool Siddiqui, Javed Hanif, Aamir Khan, Wasim Akhtar and Kanwar Naveed Jamil.

Sindh Governor Imran Ismail was also present. The meeting discussed issues and development needs of Sindh province and especially Karachi, development projects and other allied issues and allocations for the purpose in the upcoming budget. The delegation briefed the PM on the development needs of Karachi and Hyderabad and the administrative issues facing them.

The delegation thanked the PM for the Karachi package and stressed its effective implementation. The prime minister said the federal government was fully aware of the development needs of the people of Sindh province, especially those living in Karachi and Hyderabad. The PM assured the delegation that the development needs of Karachi and Hyderabad would be considered during preparation of the next budget.

Separately, PM Imran Khan said “our economic turnaround and success of our construction policy was showing results in different sectors, and a near-bankrupt CDA was closing the financial year with Rs73 billion surplus.

He tweeted: “Pakistan is changing. A near-bankrupt CDA, which posted deficit f Rs5.4 billion in 2017, will close this financial year with Rs73b surplus and Rs26b already in accounts. Well done CDA team.

“With financial stability achieved, it’s time to accelerate transformation of Islamabad into a model city with priority being on reform and restructuring.

“Other mega cities can also become self-sustaining economic engines of growth through commitment, transparency and innovation,” he wrote. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Imran Khan Friday made an appeal to the world community to protect our ecosystems, saying it is time that the world comes together to save the environment for our coming generations.

“We need to protect our environment. The rapidly depleting tree cover and degradation of our environment needs to be stopped,” he said while virtually addressing the launch of Gala for UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration.

Prime Minister said this is part of the United Nations decade of ecosystem restoration. “This is Pakistan’s contribution. Today we’ve completed billion trees; our target is 10 billion trees. We also have started another ambitious programme of increasing our national parks.

“So we have now increased nine national parks, adding to our 30 odd parks which had been existing in the past 70 years. “The idea is, by adding to our national parks that we increase our tree cover, we protect our wildlife a lot of our wildlife had been diminishing over the years because of lack of habitat.

“Also, we are increasing our mangrove cover and mangroves as we all know, they conserve the greatest amount of oxygen they release the greatest amount of oxygen in the atmosphere,” he noted.

Premier Imran said, “And finally, what we want to do is also to restore our wetlands, and by using a floodwaters we hope to restore wetlands at the same time raise the water levels the aquifers replenish the aquifer water tables that have been going down.

“We also opened the process to create green jobs, employ women and youth in planting the trees, and during the coronavirus, we managed to get 80,000 green jobs to our people, saving them from the unemployment that followed the lockdowns, because of the coronavirus, and so we enabled our youth to have jobs, and especially women in remote areas where they grow nurseries,” he noted.