The business community and traders in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa strongly opposed the levy of the Gas Infrastructure Development Cess (GIDC) on small provinces. President of KP Chamber of Commerce and Industry (KPCCI) Fuad Ishaq in a statement urged the federal government to take the issue of imposing GIDC to the Council of Common Interest (CCI), as it is going to levy 35 percent of GIDC on the three smaller provinces only to lay gas pipeline to Punjab from Iran. He furthermore said the government's move to recover the three-year GIDC arrears form the consumers in their gas bills that would be injustice to them, particularly the consumers in smaller provinces.
The KPCCI president said the government is going to recover the gas levy on the account of GIDC from the consumers in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Balochistan and Sindh only to develop gas infrastructure in Punjab. He asked the federal government to stop all sorts of actions on the GIDC Ordinance 2014 through which the federal government got the powers to levy the cess.
Fuad Ishaq said the GIDC was earlier imposed in 2011 by the federal government by enacting the GIDC Act 2011 to develop different projects, including the Iran Pakistan (IP) Gas Pipelines Project, Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) Pipelines project, LNG Import Project and LPG Supply Enhancement Projects. The PHC on June 13, 2013, declared the GIDC unconstitutional and the judgement was also upheld by the Supreme Court on August 22, 2014. However, the government is recovering the GIDC under the new ordinance which will expire on May 22. But the federal government wanted to pass it from the Parliament that is an unjust, he added.
He said the KP province is producing over 500MMCFD of gas, whereas its consumption was only around 200MMCFD, but even then the industrial and commercial consumers in the province would go to pay Rs 200 more on MMBTU, while the CNG sector would pay Rs 300 per MMBTU as GIDC.