Opposition MPAs criticise Sindh govt for administrative issues as discussion on budget commences

An opposition legislator disclosed in the Sindh Assembly on Friday that the office of a town committee in the province had 22 computer operators but not a single computer.

Grand Democratic Alliance (GDA) MPA Shaharyar Khan Mahar made this startling disclosure as the House commenced general discussion on the newly presented budget of the provincial government for the upcoming financial year 2021-22.

Mahar said the town committee in question was part of his home district Shikarpur. He mentioned it as an example to prove his assertion that sheer mismanagement and bad governance had a major role in the pilferage of precious public fiscal resources in the province.

He remarked that such a sorry state of affairs had been prevailing in the municipal agencies when the incumbent Sindh local government minister was considered as the de facto deputy chief minister of the province.

Speaker Agha Siraj Khan Durrani objected to the remarks of the GDA lawmaker, reminding him that the rules of the government did not have any provision to create the post of the deputy CM. He, however, added that it could be possible that there were many aspirants for this imagined coveted position.

Mahar said that if one went through the budget books of the Sindh government, he or she got the impression that these documents belonged to a highly developed country. He maintained that the condition of the government-run schools and hospitals in the province was as bad as it ever used to be.

The GDA legislator said his home town Shikarpur had been facing worst law and order situation but despite that, it had minimal deployment of police force. To prove his point, he said 2,000 police personnel were deputed in Shikarpur, whereas, Larkana and Nawabshah had 5,000 and 4,600 police personnel respectively.

He alleged that incompetent police officials were deliberately posted in Shikarpur. Prime Minister Imran Khan’s government had recently presented an exemplary federal budget, said Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) MPA Saeed Afridi as he criticising the performance of the Sindh government, stating that stray dogs had been found inside a functional public hospital in Thatta.

He lamented that the children of the province were suffering from malnutrition despite the fact that the Sindh government had reserved Rs132 billion for the health sector. Afridi added that there was a government-run dispensary in the Frontier Colony area of Karachi but it gave the look of a haunted house.

The PTI MPA expressed grief over the fact that victims of dog bites in the province continued to lose their lives. He said many buildings had been constructed for public hospitals in Sindh but those hospitals were yet to be made functional.

He said the expenditure of the last year’s budget of the Sindh government had been unaccounted for.

Afridi alleged that up to 90 per cent population of the province had to drink polluted water as there had been no progress in the schemes for drinking water in Sindh. Dewan Sachal, another MPA of the PTI, said a bill had been tabled in the Sindh Assembly in 2016 to stop the forced conversions in the province but its approval had been pending for the last many years.

He said the new budget of Sindh should contain an allocation for promotion of religious tourism in the province. He mentioned the Punjab government’s budget in that regard, in which there was an allocation for the Sikh community.

PTI MPA Dr Imran Ali Shah said uneducated staffers had been deputed in the provincial health department. He added that the Sindh government had worked for 11 long years to build a medical college in Mirpurkhas.

He stated that the CT Scan and MRI machines were not working at the Civil Hospital, Karachi, whereas, the Lyari General Hospital had also been in a bad condition. He was of the view that the people of the province did not get high quality healthcare services despite the fact that billions of rupees were reserved for the health sector every year.