CCI meeting delayed for a second time

It has now been scheduled for August 28

ISLAMABAD: The government has deferred a meeting of the Council of Common Interests (CCI) for a second time.

Scheduled to be held on Wednesday with Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi in the chair, the CCI meeting will now be held on August 28.

Before that, the meeting was to be held on July 31, but was cancelled in the wake of the disqualification of Nawaz Sharif as prime minister by the Supreme Court on July 28.



Sources in the Ministry of Inter Provincial Coordination (IPC) confirmed to The Express Tribune that it received directives from the PM Secretariat early Monday morning to cancel the meeting.

“The new date for the meeting has been set for August 28 but we were also told, over the telephone, by the secretariat staff that it should be considered as a tentative date as changes may still be possible,” said a senior official of the ministry.

The CCI is a constitutional body, which takes up mainly power-sharing disputes between the federation and provinces.

A senior official of the ministry said it was planned that Asif Bajwa, Chief Statistician of the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics, would brief the CCI members about the results of the sixth population census and seek their formal approval.

National Water Policy

Another, high-priority issue on the agenda of the CCI meeting was the long-delayed National Water Policy (NWP), which was to be presented by the Ministry of Water and Power.

The water policy was to be presented by officials of the Ministry of Water and Power as the issue of water distribution has been a bone of contention between Centre and Sindh. The government of Sindh accuses Punjab of robbing the province of its due share.

The policy had to be presented in previous meetings of the ICC, but it could not happen because of an incomplete draft. The ministry had forwarded the policy to the IPC Ministry on January 13 for formal approval.

The approval of the policy has been on hold since 2005 when its first draft was formulated after a long review process as well as consultation among all major stakeholders. The successive federal cabinets, including the current one, made many an attempt to get the policy approved, but in vain.



The NWP draft focuses on the impacts of climate change, advocates water pricing and highlights regional cooperation challenges. It also suggests that reservoirs should be built for water conservation, and efforts be made on war footings for availability and quality of freshwater resources to meet agricultural, energy security and environmental needs.

The agenda of the deferred meeting also included review of the National Forest Policy and Import of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) which were discussed in the CCI’s May 2 meeting.

In the last meeting, three provinces, excluding Punjab, had argued that the federal government had no right to take a decision on gas import. They had argued that such matters should be placed before the CCI so that all the provinces could have a proper say.

In view of their protests, the federal government had agreed to table the LNG policy before the CCI for review. Earlier, the federal government had been seeking approval of LNG-related matters from the Economic Coordination Committee.

Meanwhile, other items scheduled for discussion included establishment of a fiscal coordination committee; allocation of 1,200 cusecs additional water for Karachi; at-source deductions of K-P’s share from the divisible pool; implementation of Kazi Committee methodology for the calculation net hydel profit; supply of gas to localities in five-kilometer radius of gas production fields and implementation of Article 154 of the Constitution.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 22^nd, 2017.