KARACHI:Sindh Information and Labour Minister, Saeed Ghani, and Sindh Food Minister, Mukesh Kumar Chawla, both have advised the provincial Governor, Imran Ismail, to hold a press conference on the natural gas crisis and hike in the prices of electricity, petrol, and medicines, to show that he is really concerned about the well-being of the people in the province.
Speaking at a joint press conference here at the Sindh Assembly building on Wednesday, the two Sindh Ministers said that the Governor should better get accurate facts and figures before conducting a press conference to blame the Sindh government for the shortage of wheat in the province.
The provincial Food Minister told media persons that the Sindh government had available with it the stock of 3,75,000 tonnes of wheat till 30th March, 2022 for providing it to the flour mills and Atta chakki in the province. Chawla, who also holds the portfolio of Excise and Taxation department of the Sindh government, said that Sindh Governor while addressing a press conference two days back had wrongly blamed the Sindh government that it had been providing wheat to the flour mills in the province in less quantity. He said that people who accompanied the Sindh Governor had been providing wrong information and statistics to him (the Governor) as the same were used without any verification at the press conference to blame the provincial government.
He said that as a matter of fact all the flour mills in Sindh were being provided with wheat in accordance with their respective quotas. He said the Sindh government in the last year had procured 12,50,000 tonnes of wheat as till the present day all the flour mills and chakki in the province were provided with sufficient quantity of essential food commodity every month. He said the Sindh government regularly released 2,50,000 tonnes of wheat to the flour mills every month as half of this quantity went to 82 flour mills and chakki based in Karachi. He advised the Sindh Governor to better hold a press conference on the recent increase in withholding tax to be paid by the people at the time of registration of their new motor vehicles.
Sindh Information Minister Saeed Ghani said that people associated with the present federal government had been in the habit of levelling baseless allegations against the political opponents to divert the attention of the public away from genuine issues in the country. He said the PTI’s rule in the country over the last three years had ruined the national economy as the people had become the ultimate sufferers of this situation. He said that Pakistan ranked at 117th place on the World corruption perception index in 2018 as now the country stood at 140th position.
He predicted that country’s standing on the same index would further deteriorate to the 160th position if the PTI’s rule continued in the country for another two years. He said the farmers in the country had to face the situation of fertilizer shortage while the country’s exports had been declined by 66 per cent owing to curtailment of the gas supply to the industries.
He said the electricity consumers had to pay inflated power bills as the expensive furnace oil had been used to do power generation in the country as the present government had failed to timely procure LNG for winter. To a question, the Sindh Information Minister was of the view that Jamaat-e-Islami had taken an ill-advised decision to block main roads of Karachi in the coming days as part of its agitation campaign as such a mode of protest would cause immense hardships to the masses. He said that MQM had been doing politics to promote ethnic divide and prejudice in the province as it had foreseen crushing defeat in the forthcoming local government polls in Sindh.