PPPP former Finance Minister and Chairman of the Senate Standing Committee on Finance and Revenue, Senator Saleem Mandviwalla announced the shadow budget at a news conference here at Zardari House. Senator Usman Saifullah Khan, former MNA Chaudhry Manzoor, former Punjab Finance Minister Tanvir Kaira, Secretary General PPPP Senator Farhatullah Babar and Media Co-ordinator Nazir Dhoki were also present during the press conference.
Mandviwalla said that an additional allocation of Rs 47 billion per year to health is envisaged to bridge the yawning gap in this sector. He said that a pilot project of health insurance would be introduced in the first stage in Islamabad to serve as model for the provinces. The provinces will be persuaded to raise education spending to achieve the target of 5 per cent of GDP in the next five years, he added.
He said that the PPPP has called for a 25 per cent increase in pays and pensions, minimum wages of Rs 18,000 per month and a separate fund for social protection of vulnerable groups, including transgender community, in the poverty alleviation flagship Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP). While unveiling the party's shadow budget ahead of the national budget due on May 27, the PPPP leader said that sales tax on goods and services and provincial excise duty would be collected by Provincial Board of Revenue. The federal excise duty will also be collected by the provincial Boards of Revenue and transferred to the federal government on agreed terms, Mandviwalla said, while explaining salient features of the shadow budget.
He said that overall debt had increased from Rs 9.5 trillion in 2013 to Rs 12.7 trillion in 2016, while external debt rose from $61 billion to $73 billion during the same period. He said that net public debt exceeded Rs 18.28 trillion - a whooping increase of 35 per cent during the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) government. Mandviwalla said that the PML-N government had further pushed the nation into the bottomless pit of debt leaving little for social safety and human development.
To break this vicious cycle of taking loans for repayment of old loans, he said, the PPPP proposed involving private sector in infrastructural development and a massive reduction in debt-financed investment in infrastructure by the federal government. "The rich becoming the richer and the poor becoming the poorer is a bane of our society," he said, adding that spending which benefited only the rich would be stopped and it will be diverted to the benefit of the poorest of the poor. Withdrawal of 5 per cent federal excise duty on crude petroleum is also envisaged to bring down the cost of transportation for the poor, he said.
He said that legislation would be enacted for mandatory sharing of information by all federal and provincial tax agencies, National Database and Registration Authority (Nadra) and law enforcement agencies (LEAs) to document economy and plug loopholes in tax recovery.
About the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), he said that the party vowed to build on priority western route agreed upon in the May 2015 at All Parties Conference (APC) in the Prime Minister House but was dumped by the government. Special training programmes will be devised to initiate businessmen in trading with China, he added. Dilating on it further, Mandviwalla said that the CPEC was formally launched during the twilight weeks of the PPPP government when the Gwadar Port project was transferred from Singapore to China in February 2013.
To heal the wounds of most underdeveloped and militancy infested areas of Balochistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and tribal areas, the centre piece of CPEC is the western route of the corridor, he said. He said that Zardari has been deeply concerned over dumping of the western route, insensitivity to the hopes and aspirations of smaller provinces and lack of transparency in the CPEC project.
"The Prime Minister lectured some 1,500 OBOR delegates in Beijing on "transcending differences and resolving conflicts through dialogue to leave behind a legacy of peace." Just when Nawaz Sharif was making right noises in Beijing, the minister for planning was dismissing indignantly as "factually incorrect" concerns raised in the media back home, Mandviwalla added.
Mandviwalla deplored that the National Industrial Policy, 2011 aimed at turning Pakistan into "a factory for the world rather than a shop" was not implemented by the government. "Nawaz Sharif is a businessman and he ought to know that continuity of economic policies must not become a casualty of the politics," he said and vowed to revive the industrial policy of 2011.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2017