Sindh Assembly session: PTI mounts protest against rising inflation, poverty

KARACHI: The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) on Monday staged a protest against rising inflation and growing poverty during the Sindh Assembly session, while the PPP called for converting slums into planned housing societies.

The pre-budget session entered its second day with the PTI legislators protesting over the poverty surge in Sindh and the treasury members seeking development of sewerage and civic infrastructure programme for Karachi.

Sharmila S Faruqui from the treasury benches said that the Sindh government should convert the slumps in Karachi into planned societies. “Karachi needs desperately a master plan,” she added.

The house fell into pandemonium after PTI's Khurram Sher Zaman Khan raised an issue of "government's restrictions" on the news media, saying that the PPP is part of the censorship policy.

In reply, Mukesh Kumar Chawla, Sindh Parliamentary Affairs Minister said the PTI lawmakers should know what their government had done to the media in the past. He claimed that his party stands by with the banned news channel.

Firdous Shamim Naqvi of the PTI took off his cap, shervani and unbuttoned his shirt in protest against growing "poverty" in Sindh. When Speaker Aga Siraj Khan Durrani asked his to button his shirt, he replied that "shirts are opened in severe grief."

He said that the rising food inflation badly hit the poor in the society with the country's financial position nearing to a collapse. Factories have closed down, he said that the farmers in a deep crisis.

MQM's lady lawmaker, Mangla Sharma said that the ailing economy should be safeguarded from "corruption and commission". She proposed that the government should not undertake new uplift schemes and focus on finishing the continuing ones.

She questioned the government's ability and capacity regarding evolving a new fiscal budget for the province under the present circumstances. She asked the government to advice on whether the public should queue up for getting flour or drop their kids to schools.

She told the house that some 14000 students have failed the recent intermediate exams, asking the PPP rule that how it will manage if floods hit the province again.

GDA's Abdul Razzaque Rahimoon complained that the government did not include a single uplift scheme for the opposition constituencies in the continuing fiscal budget. He also cast doubts over the transparency and authenticity of the census in Sindh.

He said that the census officials are not being provided with functional devices as the gadgets do not receive data transmission signals. "The census is not being taken transparently," he claimed.

The house also adopted a resolution with a majority vote, signaling serious reservation on the transparency of the census being taken in the province.

The resolution, which Sindh Irrigation Minister Jam Khan Shoro had tabled, stating that the public of Sindh are being kept in dark on the digital census. It said that the province does not have access to the census data, which grows doubts on its transparency.

There is no mechanism to include houses, which the recent floods washed away, in the census. Demographic maps provided for the census have also errors, it said.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2023