State Minister for Water and Power Abid Sher Ali told the National Assembly on Friday that 9,000 mega watt (MW) electricity would be added to the national grid system by March 2018 to end power load shedding in the country.
Responding to various questions during Question Hour, the minister said the government had launched several power projects to enhance generation and cope with menace of load shedding.
To a question, he said that electricity generation would be increased to 18,000 MW by the end of this year.
In order to bridge the existing demand supply gap to generate affordable electricity, the Private Power and Infrastructure Board (PPIB) under the auspices of ministry of water and power has initiated several coal/hydro and R-LNG based power projects with cumulative capacity of 12,620 MW at various locations in the country during the last two years.
The minister said that new transmission lines were also being laid besides upgrading the existing system. The lengthy transmission lines were also being bifurcated to reduce line losses, he added.
To a question, Abid Sher Ali said that 70 per cent land for Diamer Bhasha dam had already been acquired. The Gilgit-Baltistan secretary was tasked to complete 100 per cent land acquisition for this mega project, he added.
He said the government had also released Rs 45 billion rupees for land acquisition.
Abid said the government was also committed to starting work on this mega project from its own resources in case no foreign donor agency was found to finance it.
He said that PC-I of Diamer Bhasha Dam Project was approved by ECNEC on August 20, 2009, at a total cost of Rs 8,94,257 million including land acquisition and re-settlement through PSDP funding.
Parliamentary Secretary for Finance, Revenue and Economic Affairs Rana Muhammad Afzal Khan said on Friday that voluntary tax scheme had been extended up to March 31 on the demand of traders.
Replaying to a calling attention notice, he said after March 31 the tax would be collected from traders according to law.
Rana Muhammad Afzal Khan said that it was not an amnesty scheme but voluntary tax compliance scheme for traders to bring them into the tax net. He said the government held negotiations with traders across the board for six months to finalise the scheme. He said the credit went to the PML-N government for bringing traders into voluntarily tax scheme. He said the scheme would broaden the tax base through enhanced tax collection and the government would be in a position to lower the tax rates.
The parliamentary secretary said the scheme was different from the previous ones as smugglers and black marketers could not benefit from this scheme. He said no target was fixed but the government expected that more people would join this scheme. He said the foreign remittances were being monitored as per the National Action Plan (NAP).
