LAHORE, Sept 12: The Public Accounts Committee-I of the Punjab Assembly has expressed its annoyance at the poor performance of the Public Heath Engineering Department (PHED) and various development authorities working under it.

A meeting of the committee held here on Wednesday with Chaudhry Zaheer in the chair declared the performance of various development authorities and Wasa as unsatisfactory and sought an inquiry into incomplete projects and recoveries as well as expenses over and above the approved limits.

Taking up audit paras regarding the PHED, the committee noticed that most of the objections raised by auditors were about not fully consuming the approved budgets during the financial year and depositing funds into bank saving accounts for use in the next year.

Directing a ban on the practice, the panel observed that the exercise was being carried out to show savings while, in fact, it was causing losses to the provincial kitty as banks were offering six to seven per cent markup for the money taken by the government at almost 13 per cent markup.

It asked the Lahore Development Authority director-general to join the proceedings on Thursday (today).

Meanwhile, the PML-Q has submitted two separate adjournment motions with the Punjab Assembly secretariat seeking an open debate on the Lahore factory fire and flood havoc in south Punjab.

Submitted by the Q League parliamentary leader Chaudhry Zaheer, the first motion says the provincial government has not learnt a lesson from Kharak and Shah Alami tragedies as at least 4,000 fire incidents have been reported only in Lahore during the last four years.

It said in the Kharak incident a pharmaceutical factory’s boiler blast had caused devastation and the government had announced shifting all industrial units outside the municipal limits. But, it regretted, the announcement was never materialized.

The second motion said that despite warnings by the Met office, the National Disaster Management Authority and the opposition (during the last budget session), the government took no step to save the people of south Punjab from floods. It said had the government implemented the Justice Mansoor Ali Shah report on previous flooding the poor masses could have been saved this time.

It sarcastically said the rulers were acting on just one policy: “Look busy and do nothing.”