Quarterly report of Sindh govt’s third budget has exposed bad governance: PTI

Rejecting the Sindh government’s claim that the federation has reduced the share of the province in the National Financial Commission (NFC) award, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf parliamentary leader in the Sindh Assembly Bilal

Ghaffar said on Friday the quarterly report of the provincial government’s third budget had exposed bad governance in the province.

He said the federal government had given Rs501 billion or 66 per cent of the NFC in nine months to the Sindh government. “But the provincial government has failed to reach its target of tax collections. The provincial government has failed to show any performance whether it is about tax collection or development of the province.”

“The tax collection rate is 47 per cent while tax revenue remains at 18 per cent, which is surprisingly very low,” he said. “It collected Rs2.9 billion in taxes while in the sectors of agricultural and others it had a tax collection target of Rs3.874 billion, but it collected 484 million rupees, only 10 per cent.”

He claimed that the target of the property tax collection was Rs9.37 billion, while the government only collected Rs960 million. “This is the poor governance of the Sindh government failing to even get near their tax collection targets.”

Ghaffar said the expenditure of the government for nine months was Rs646 billion, of which Rs570 billion was the current expenditure. “Rs560 billion was spent to run the government and not a single rupee was spent on new schemes in nine months,” he said, adding that the government was incompetent and had failed miserably.

“The Sindh government says that the federation has reduced its NFC share, but they are liars. The NFC is being paid in full by the federation,” the PTI leader said. The government had a balance of Rs35 billion, which showed it had the resources but no strategy, he said.

The MPA said there was no transport facility in a megacity like Karachi. “The Sindh transport budget was Rs17.7 billion, the release was only Rs1.8 billion and the expenditure was only Rs70 million, i.e. 3 per cent was spent on the transport of the province,” he stated.

The PTI legislator said they were surprised that money was not being spent in the important departments, but the provincial government had spent so much money on irrigation and forests.