ISLAMABAD: The National Assembly members on Wednesday started moving cut motions for amendment in the finance bill as the debate on the federal budget resumed on Wednesday.
About 720 cut motions have been moved with regards to 10 ministries.
These included cuts in allocations to the Aviation Division, the Establishment Division, the National Security Division, and the Poverty Alleviation and Safety Division.
The members will be voted on by lawmakers in the House.
Prime Minister Imran Khan, was also in attendance today, whereas the opposition parties were low in number due to the All Party Conference (APC) is Islamabad, hosted by Jamiat-Ulema-e-Islam (JUI-F) chief Fazlur Rahman.
Earlier today, Minister for Revenue Hammad Azhar moved various demands for grants that were approved through a voice vote.
Speaking prior to the voice vote, Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) leader Ayesha Ghaus Pasha said that there had been an 83 per cent increase in the demands for grants.
Last year, the grants (charged expenditures) were Rs23,732 billion and now the government is seeking approval of charged expenditures worth Rs43,478bn, she said, adding that this was due to the government’s mismanagement, not due to the loans taken by the previous regimes.
She said the government was pushing people below the line of poverty and yet it takes credit for ‘initiating social welfare programmes’.
Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) leader Nafisa Shah demanded a parliamentary body to review the debt management policy of the current government instead of a commission to investigate the utilisation of debts obtained by previous governments.
PPP’s Hina Rabbani Khar also called out the government for its austerity drive. She said the prime minister used to claim in his speeches that he had reduced the expenditure of PM Office, but the current budget allocates Rs1.17bn to the PM Office as compared to last year’s Rs986m.
PML-N’s Khawaja Asif expressed his fear that the “free fall of the Pakistani rupee will drown us”. He said the US dollar and British pound currently trading at Rs161 and Rs201, it appeared that rupee devaluation had gone out of control.
PPP’s Abdul Qadir Patel criticised the government over its large cabinet size. “There is an army of ministers, advisers, and spokespersons. They are enjoying protocol and wasting public money,” he said.
PML-N’s Khurram Dastagir also criticised the government for a big cabinet size. “They used to say that their cabinet would comprise 12 members. Now it is four times larger,” he said.
PRODUCTION FOR WAZIR AND DAWAR:
MNAs Ali Wazir and Mohsin Dawar are absent from the Lower House as they remain on judicial remand in the custody of the Counter-Terrorism Department despite calls by various members of the opposition to the speaker to issue their production orders.
At the start of the session, PPP Chairperson Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari had once again urged the National Assembly speaker to issue the production orders of Waziristan MNAs Mohsin Dawar and Ali Wazir so that they could attend the ongoing budget session and join voting on cut motions.
Bilawal said that a wrong precedent was being set by not allowing MNAs from Waziristan to play their role and represent their constituents in the budget.
