Opp boycotts supplementary budget approval

Says not enough time spent on supplementary spending.

LAHORE:

The Punjab Assembly (PA) approved a supplementary budget of Rs82.380 billion for 2012-13 on Saturday amidst a boycott by opposition legislators angry at the lack of time allowed them to discuss demands for grants.

Of the 41 supplementary demands for grants, 18 were token demands for Rs1,000 each. Five cut motions were discussed. Thirty-six demands were approved ‘by guillotine’, meaning they did not come up for discussion and were put straight to a vote.

The sitting began at 10.45am under the chairmanship of Speaker Rana Iqbal Khan. In one cut motion, the opposition said that the demand of Rs108.616 million for state trading in food grains and sugar should be reduced to Re1.

Samina Khawar Hayat of the Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid said that the Food Department was Rs100 billion in debt and paid Rs11 billion a year in interest. She asked the food minister why the department purchased wheat from farmers and not rice.

Food Minister Bilal Yasin said that such grants were used to compensate orphans and widows of employees who died in service. He said that this was a cause that the opposition should applaud rather than criticise.

In a cut motion on irrigation, opposition members demanded that the government clamp down on water theft from canals. Irrigation Minister Yawar Zaman responded that the government was working on legislation that would increase the punishment for water theft. The existing law was weak, he said.

Speaking about the cut motion on prisons, Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf's (PTI) Sibtain Khan said that the prisons budget was being misused and the Rs58.748 million supplementary grant should be reduced to Re1. The speaker gave him just two or three minutes to talk, which the opposition protested against.

Boycott

The speaker ignored repeated opposition demands for more time to discuss the cut motions and did not even allow them to take up the final motion, on the police. Instead, he ordered that voting on the demands for grants go ahead.

The opposition members reacted furiously. Leader of the Opposition Mian Mehmoodur Rashid of the PTI, speaking on a point of order, said that he and his colleagues did not wish to be a part of “the irresponsibility, cruelty and injustice which the treasury benches and speaker” were about to exercise in passing the supplementary budget.

The government, he said, had spent billions of rupees without the house’s approval and was now seeking to pass the supplementary budget without giving members a chance to discuss it. Each member should be given the opportunity to raise questions about the spending, he added.

The 41 opposition members walked out of the house when the speaker applied the guillotine. He sent two treasury members, Tahir Khalil Sindhu and Chaudhry Shafique, to try and bring the opposition back in. As the demands for grants were read out, the speaker repeatedly called on the opposition to return. They did not.

After the grants were approved, Finance Minister Mujtaba Shujaur Rehman thanked the members, journalists and public servants for participating in the budget session. The speaker then prorogued the session indefinitely.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 30^th, 2013.