Finance Minster Dr Abdul Hafeez Shaikh said on Saturday that the size of the government on federal, provincial, tribal and district levels was “unmanageably large” for the resource-constrained Pakistan.
He said the governments in the centre, provinces, tribal areas, Azad Kashmir and other districts were consuming most of the public money. “When Quaid-e-Azam was the governor general of Pakistan, he had a six-member cabinet including the prime minister,” he said, adding that former president Pervez Musharraf also had 18 members in his cabinet initially.
“So we have got to raise this voice as the government activities are unmanageably large,” Sheikh said. He told a seminar organised by Transparency International-Pakistan (TIP) on “Performance of the Federal Tax Ombudsman” here at a local hotel that his government had issued show-cause notices to thousands of people identified as income tax evaders.