Daily Times

ISLAMABAD: Opposition leader in the National Assembly Syed Khurshid Shah on Saturday proposed having a four-year tenure for the National and provincial assemblies instead of five.

Speaking on the electoral reforms, the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) leader said he raised this issue first in 2014 that the assembly tenure should be of four years. The main reason behind this was to let democracy flourish in the country, he added.

He requested the government to implement this proposal under the electoral reforms in the next constitutional amendment.

Nawaz Sharif and Ishaq Dar had earlier agreed that the proposal for a four-year tenure should come into force from the next term, Shah said, adding that this step would be in better interest of the government and institutions.

The opposition leader also raised reservations over the provisional report of the population census and said the records of the Statistics Division and the Pakistan Army should be compared. Shah said the facts would come to the fore once the two census records were compared. Pakistan’s total population has been recorded at 207.774 million, according to the provisional summary results of the sixth population and housing census.

The census began after a period of 19 years on March 15. It was conducted in 16 districts of Punjab, eight districts of Sindh, 14 districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 15 districts of Balochistan, five districts of Azad Jammu and Kashmir and five districts of Gilgit-Baltistan.

Published in Daily Times, August 27^th 2017.