Daily Times

ISLAMABAD: Minister of State for Information and Broadcasting Farrukh Habib said on Monday that Prime Minister Imran Khan was taking practical measures to ensure sustainable development in the country by providing a level-playing field to each federating unit.

“Imran Khan desires all-encompassing development as he is the prime minister of the entire country, including Sindh,” said Farrukh in a news statement while pointing out special allocations for socio-economic uplift of different federating units in the federal budget for the fiscal year 2021-22.

He said the federal government had earmarked Rs98 billion for the Karachi Transmission Plan, Rs40 billion for the development of Gilgit Baltistan, Rs 20 billion for South Balochistan, and Rs19.5 billion for the uplift of 14 districts of Sindh.

The special packages were meant to remove resources’ disparity among various areas of the country, he added.

Farrukh regarded the prime minister’s special package of Rs446 billion for the socioeconomic development of 14 underdeveloped districts of Sindh as a ‘gift.’

He said those districts are: Badin, Hyderabad, Larkana, Tandoyar, Dadu, Jacobabad, Mirpur Khas, Tando Muhammad Khan, and Ghotki.

The completion of those socioeconomic projects would mark a new era of development in Khairpur, Naushahro Feroze, Sanghar, Shikarpur, and Sukkur, he added.

The minister said the provincial share from the federal divisible pool would increase to Rs3.41 trillion in the next fiscal year, with an increase of 25 percent.

He decried bad governance in Sindh and said that the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) had ruled the province for the last three consecutive terms but completely failed to deliver in the province, especially during the last couple of years.

Farrukh said the people of Sindh, including Karachi, were fed up with the PPP’s corruption, plundering, and fake accounts.

He said all the records of increasingly spreading pauperdom and deadly diseases in the interior Sindh had been broken, but the ‘callous’ provincial government was not paying any heed to these issues.

He said that the people of Sindh had now started an uprising against the provincial government.