Sindh government spokesperson Murtaza Wahab on Saturday objected to the Centre’s slashing of the province’s National Finance Commission award in the federal budget 2020-21, saying the Rs 234 billion reduction will hurt the province’s development.
Addressing a press conference alongside Information Minister Nasir Shah, Wahab said, “Provinces receive 80% [of their budget] from the federal government […] How will the province develop and how can we pay the salaries of [government employees]?” He claimed that the Centre had not allocated funds for tackling coronavirus and that the government could only make a decision of not imposing a lockdown. “They will blame the provincial chief ministers later on [if they fail to handle the pandemic],” he said, adding, “The federal government does not seem to be helping the provinces in the health sector [….] We got to know that it takes a week for getting tested [for Covid-19] in Islamabad.”
Talking about Hyderabad University, he said that there was not a single rupee allocated for it, while the prime minister had already inaugurated the varsity. “No fund was allocated for Tharparkar in the federal budget,” Wahab said, adding that the Centre was not helping the province. Wahab, speaking about private hospitals overcharging patients, said that the health commission will probe the matter and that the Sindh government is upgrading public hospitals. “At NIPA, we will establish a 200-bed facility with 48 ventilators,” he said. Meanwhile, Nasir Shah said that the spread of the coronavirus could have been stemmed had the federal government closed its borders at the initial stage. “If the people were tested when they came in through the border, we could have controlled the disease […] Sindh has done a lot to save the lives of its people,” he claimed.
