The Pakistan People's Party (PPP) in the Punjab has voiced concern over the rising prices, saying the twice-increase in the liquefied petroleum gas prices in a week clearly suggests that the government is quite clueless about predicaments of the common man, already being hit by the rising prices. Party President Manzoor Wattoo said on Thursday the veggie and fruit prices had gone up almost double in the recent past, but the Punjab government and the administration were hardly pushed to rectify the situation despite the fact that vendors were in squeezing dry frenzy of consumers with impunity.
"The chief minister's day-and-night hard work, as he claims, is proving for the worse because the situation on the ground has gone from bad to worse looking at the all aspects of life," he said sarcastically.
"Law and order is far from satisfactory as the graph of heinous crimes is rising both horizontally and vertically in the province and people are suffering from an acute sense of insecurity." He also said that the social sector condition was "pathetic by any measure because facilities in health, education and civic amenities were miserable." No road map is afoot to improve the situation. The comparative meagre allocations of budget in these sectors are testimony to the apathy of the government which is obsessed with the showy and flashy projects, like the metro train and bus projects that are proving a sheer wastage of limited resources and optimised as the physical manifestations of wrong priorities. These have created rural-urban imbalances that will not bode well to the imperatives of social and regional justice.
"Moreover, these projects are proving white elephants because billions of rupees have to be spent from the public exchequer as subsidy to keep them afloat, he pointed out. The non-payment of salaries to the employees of Metro Bus projects proves the point of the non-viability and ill-timing of the project." He demanded that the Provincial Finance Commission Award be created in the Punjab with mandate to disburse provincial funds on equitable basis among all districts with a view to containing the reckless and senseless distribution of the provincial resources by the provincial chief executive. "It will also address the yawning gap of development between the rural and urban population that had assumed dangerous proportion due to flawed development strategy of the Punjab government," he added.