Federal agencies owe over Rs20 billion to KWSC, PAC informed

The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) of the Sindh Assembly was informed on Wednesday that various federal government subsidiary agencies with offices in the provincial capital owed over Rs20 billion to the Karachi Water & Sewerage Corporation (KWSC) as water dues for the past eight years.

The PAC met at the Sindh Assembly's committee room with its chairman Nisar Ahmed Khuhro presiding over the session. The committee considered audit paras regarding the KWSC's financial accounts from 2019 to 2021.

During the review of one of the audit paras, KWSC officials told the PAC about the billions of rupees payable by the Karachi-based federal government agencies since 2016. The KWSC officials said the Pakistan Steel had not paid Rs10 billion to Karachi’s water utility for the past 10 years.

Other defaulting federal agencies owing massive sums to the KWSC include the Karachi Port Trust, Pakistan State Oil, Pakistan Railways, Printing Corporation, Cotton Export Corporation, Pakistan International Airlines, Pakistan National Shipping Corporation, Pakistan Machine Tool Factory, Port Qasim Authority, Cotton Export Corporation, cantonment boards and other institutions.

KWSC officials urged the PAC to take up the matter to help them get massive dues from federal agencies in Karachi. Khuhro said the KWSC should receive billions of rupees of dues from federal agencies as non-payment of these water service charges by the federal government’s subsidiary agencies is tantamount to committing injustice with Sindh.

The PAC directed officials concerned to send letters to the relevant federal government agencies in this regard. Upon inquiry, the PAC members were informed that there were around Rs1 million consumers of the KWSC in the city who were issued monthly water bills. Only 35 per cent of the consumers had been paying their water bills regularly, the meeting was told.

It was said that the KWSC had introduced a discount package to recover past water dues from its consumers. Water connections to the non-paying consumers could not be severed due to the unavailability of the metering system and a bulk water metering system was being introduced for 5,000 industrial units in Karachi with financial support from the World Bank, the PAC was told.

No biometric system

The PAC was informed on Tuesday that only manual attendance registers were being maintained to ensure that over 12,000 Karachi Metropolitan Corporation (KMC) staffers attended to their duties regularly. The KMC does not use a modern system, including biometric verification, for this purpose.

The PAC met with its chairman, Nisar Ahmed Khuhro, in the chair to review the financial accounts of the KMC from 2018 to 2021. Khuhro asked KMC Municipal Commissioner Afzal Zaidi about the total number of KMC employees, how many attended to their duties regularly, and the system in place to verify the attendance of these staffers.

The PAC members were informed that manual attendance registers only ensured that over 12,000 KMC staffers attended to their duties daily. There is no biometric-based attendance system at the KMC.

The municipal commissioner told the PAC meeting that heads of the departments of the KMC verified the daily attendance of the employees in their respective domains. He claimed that at present, there were no ghost employees at the KMC.

The PAC chairman inquired about the reason for the absence of a biometric-based attendance system at the KMC. He viewed that it was quite easy to cheat the manual attendance system as any dishonest employee could mark attendance on the manual register for an entire week or month after visiting his office just once.

The PAC directed the officials concerned to present complete attendance records and biodata of KMC staffers to prevent misuse of the public funds that could possibly be spent on paying salaries to the reported ghost municipal staffers in Karachi.

The PAC also directed the Sindh chief secretary to form a probe committee to investigate the reported presence of ghost employees at the KMC. Meanwhile, PAC member Qasim Soomro inquired about the number of parks being maintained by the KMC in the city.

The municipal commissioner told the meeting that the KMC had been managing 46 parks in Karachi and up to 90 per cent of them were functional while the land of no park in the city was under illegal occupation.

Another PAC member, Khurrum Soomro, complained that up to Rs40,000 were being charged for reserving a grave at the cemeteries in the city under the aegis of the KMC. The municipal commissioner, however, maintained that KMC charged a Rs300 official fee only for allotting a grave.