Sindh the Sindhi-speaking and Urdu-speaking communities have never said anything of the sort.
KARACHI: This is with reference to Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif’s statement suggesting the creation of Karachi into a separate province. The chief minister should know that demands for provinces have been made from residents of places like southern Punjab for a number of years and that these are linked to that region’s underdeveloped status. The residents there have often complained that the resources allocated by the provincial government in Lahore tend to be spent more on the central and nothern districts of the province. Also, people in, say, Hazara have been demanding separate provinces because they say that Peshawar is far away and for any official government work, they have to travel a long distance. This will not be the case in Karachi, which is the provincial capital.
The fact also is that people from Hazara in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and from south Punjab have been demanding new provinces for a very long time, whereas in Sindh the Sindhi-speaking and Urdu-speaking communities have never said anything of the sort.
Dr Fahad Azam
Published in The Express Tribune, April 26th, 2011.
