Karachi, February 22, 2018 (PPI-OT): Sindh Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah presiding over a meeting regarding preparation of next budget for financial year 2018-19 has given guidelines to his team to control non-development expenditures, increase allocations in social sector such as education and health and water schemes be given special focus so that they could be completed well in time. The first budget preparatory meeting the chief minister held at CM House which was attended by Chairman P and D Mohammad Waseem, Principal Secretary Sohail Rajput and experts and secretary and experts of finance department.
The meeting was informed that during the current financial year, 2974 schemes, including 2158 on-going and 816 new are in progress against an amount of Rs244 billion , including Rs39.884 million revenue. The provincial government with the personal interest and intervention has released 60 percent of the allocated amount which comes to Rs146.388 billion which is itself a record while the 50 percent of the released amount or Rs72.485 billion has been utilization.
The chief minister said that the pace of most of the development works is better than the last year but it must be monitored so that quality could also be maintained. The chief minister said that the health department was showing some progress, particularly in the hospitals which have been out-sourced, therefore this policy must be strengthened and more health units may be out-sourced in the next financial year.
The chief minister said that his leadership has urged him to work out special programmes for women, youth and for poverty alleviation. Therefore, giving guidelines to his team he said that he plans may be designed accordingly for the next budget.
Giving his priorities, the chief minister said that the number priority would be education, the other one health, water and sanitation and agriculture. He added that next year, he said he would give special focus to improvement sector. Since, it was a preliminary meeting, therefore an sketch for the next budget was discussed and more similar meetings would be held at least thrice in a month, he said.
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