‘NAB owes Sindh Rs3b’

KARACHI: At the Inter-provincial Coordination Committee meeting on April 17, Sindh will argue that it should receive its share of the Rs20 billion recovered by the National Accountability Bureau, said Makhdoom Jameelul Zaman, Sindh inter-provincial coordination minister.

“Even though we have sent many reminders to the federal government, Sindh has still not received its dues, which amount to about Rs3 billion to Rs5 billion,” he said. Talking to The Express Tribune on Wednesday, the minister said it was decided that NAB would recover the embezzled money from people and organisations and give it back to the provincial department after a 20 per cent deduction.

Another issue Sindh plans to take up at the first round of IPCC talks is the outstanding payment of the cost of public land that the federal government distributed to the Ministry of Defence for residential areas, cantonments and others housing schemes. Water About the Chashma-Jhelum link canal, Zaman said it was neither a flood canal nor a non-perennial canal.

“It is just a link canal to transfer surplus water from the River Indus to the Jhelum river,” he explained. The Punjab government gets water from the canal the whole year round instead of just the surplus water, which is defeating the actual objective of the canal’s construction, said the minister. “Now they are planning to construct a power plant on it, which will lower the water in the already shrunken Indus.”