KARACHI: Sindh Chief Minister Murad Ali Shah has directed the Finance and Local Government departments to mull over a strategy to resolve financial issues and power sharing matters between the government and Karachi Mayor Waseem Akhtar. In the backdrop of a recently held meeting between the chief minister and the mayor and subsequent requests from the latter, the CM has assured that financial constraints and administrative snags of the civic entity would be resolved in an amicable manner. “This is a good omen and shows friendly gesture of the CM and hopefully after resolution of the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation’s financial and administrative powers bottlenecks, the City Council of the civic entity would become more efficient to perform officials’ obligations,” read a statement quoting the mayor as saying. Highlighting the core issues, Waseem has remarked that on current ground realities, the civic entity has been facing hardships to meet the salaries and pension matters of employees, absence in sharing property and Octrio Zila Tax (OZT), grant in aid matter and retiring liabilities of the entity, which has been accumulated since he took over the charge of the KMC. He also requested enhancement of Rs 300 million per month to KMC in order to bail out the civic body from dire financial crunch. “Due to short release of OZT share and grant in aid to KMC against its actual establishment expenditure, the civic body has been only managing paying employees’ salary on net basis and due to this it remains unable to remit pension fund, provident fund and group insurance contributions to the tune of Rs 631.71 million with effect from July 2016 to June 2017,” he said. The matters likely to be considered by the Finance and Local Government departments include restoration of commercialisation rights of major roads (taken away from KMC resulting in minimum Rs 1,000 million deficit per year), grant of medicines for 13 KMC-run hospitals, cleaning of nullahs, funds to meet revision in basic pay scale, besides function of charged parking on KMC-administered roads, parking plaza issue, recovery of revenue on licence fee from health clearance and milch animals in Karachi and revenue recovery from BTS towers taken away from KMC, which is causing a loss of Rs 2,000 million to the KMC per annum. KMCs own resources receipts during the last fiscal year 2016-17 hardly reached Rs 1,181 million, which partly covered recurring expenditures on contingencies, M&R and purchases, etc. At present Sindh government is remitting Rs 417.533 million per month as a special grant to the civic entity. The Sindh chief secretary, principal secretary to CM, finance and local government secretaries have also been informed about the details of the CM-Mayor meeting. Published in Daily Times, October 11th 2017.