-Karachi fails to compete with Lahore because it has not been given its fair share in the budget
KARACHI: Karachi Mayor Waseem Akhtar on Wednesday said that Karachi would have been much ahead of Lahore by now, had it been given its right share in the country’s resources.
“The establishment of six districts was a blatant injustice to Karachi. People of this megacity are deprived of clean water and a proper sewerage system. Garbage lifting and disposal is also not done properly and the city faces electricity load shedding regularly,” said Mayor Waseem.
He expressed these views while addressing a press conference in the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation (KMC) Head Office on Wednesday.
Waseem wondered how long the country’s rulers would continue to cheat Karachiites and said that citizens of the city can’t be fooled anymore, they know they are being cheated.
He said that he will go to the court against KPT too, which had withheld Rs80 crore whereas, Allied Bank had withheld Rs1.75 billion and the Sindh Government curtailed Rs34 billion from the OZT share of KMC.
The mayor said that Karachi is meted out injustice under the veil of SLGO 2013. He said the Sindh Government is carrying out development projects which are to be carried out by the KMC but its revenue is being diverted to other organisations.
He stated that the powers given to provinces with the 18th amendment to the constitution are not exercised. “I am fighting for a local government system in the whole country and not only for Karachi,” he said.
Akhtar further said that KMC has 35 departments and about 13,000 staff for whom the salary amount increases with every year, but KMC receives the same amount of funding which is a cruel injustice. He said that KMC has already been facing a deficit of more than Rs1 billion.
“We had submitted 143 development schemes for the 2017-18 budget with the coordination of all six DMCs but provincial government included not a single scheme in its uplift plan. We have given Rs50 crore to each union council for an uplift,” informed the mayor.
Giving a summary of the KMC’s performance from October 2016 to April 2018, he said that a total of 473 schemes were carried out in the head of ADP in 2016-17 out of which 286 were completed and the remaining 187 have been carried forward to 2017-18. The total cost of these schemes was Rs10802.110 million.
In the current fiscal year till April 2018, a total of 459 schemes were taken which include the 272 schemes initiated by the Mayor himself, and during 2017-18 the total expenditures incurred on these projects were Rs2516.681million. Out of these 154 schemes have been completed and 169 are ongoing.
Furthermore., the 2017-18 expenditure for salaries was Rs5390 million and pension Rs2085 million whereas Rs507 million has been spent till now out of a total of the Rs2516million allocated for union council development programmes.
