Faizabad sit-in cost police Rs146m

Govt yet to release funds to the police who remain in debt of vendors

ISLAMABAD: While the three-week-long Faizabad blockade by religious protesters is over, the police are still waiting for the government release money to pay vendors who had provided food and other services to cops during the sit-in.

The Islamabad Police had sought Rs146.5 million from the government to meet the dharna expenditure. The government, however, has not provided the money.

Sources say that the police now find themselves in the debt of the vendors.  They added that around half of the total expenses were incurred on providing food, followed by hiring shipping containers to block roads around the sit-in venue and the Red Zone.



As many as 6,000 personnel including those from the Frontier Constabulary and Punjab Constabulary had been deployed in the capital for almost a month for two sit-ins. Similarly, around 200 shipping containers had been rented at a rate of Rs8,500 per day per container.

Anticipating that the protest rally led by Khadim Rizvi, which eventually resulted in the Faizabad sit-in, would require extraordinary security measures, the police had written to the Interior and Finance ministries on November 3 for releasing a supplementary grant of Rs70.495 million for the capital police.

That amount, police had estimated, would meet their expenditures for a week of deployment.

Once the protesters left Faizabad on November 27, the bill stood at Rs146.5 million.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 19^th, 2017.