KARACHI: The Sindh Assembly on Thursday echoed with remarks about surge in dog-bite cases in the province with one of the treasury members asking the opposition members to jointly approach the Supreme Court against the verdict of the Sindh High Court’s Sukkur bench that had directed the provincial assembly members to supervise drive against stray dogs.

While Sharjeel Inam Memon of the Pakistan Peoples Party said that members of provincial and National assemblies were mandated for legislation only and the municipal administrations were responsible to control dog-bite cases, Leader of Opposition Haleem Adil Sheikh of Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf asked how the opposition members could monitor the drive as they were not empowered.

MPA Memon was of the view that two members from the PPP, PTI, Grand Democratic Alliance and Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan each could approach the apex court jointly to make it clear that the legislators were not mandated to catch stray dogs or any such activity.

Giving the province-wise details of dog-bite cases, he said that he did not want to criticise anyone but the number of such cases was considerably high in other provinces.

He said that there were 180,000 dog-bite cases in Sindh, 407,000 in Punjab and 225,000 in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

The leader of opposition referred to a letter circulated among the MPAs by the assembly secretariat containing the SHC order on dog-bite cases and asked the provincial government to inform the members which department was taking action against stray dogs.

‘MPAs have nothing to do with it as the local govt is responsible for drive against stray dogs’

“We should be told who is catching or culling the dogs,” he added.

Mr Sheikh said that they were ready to sit and settle the issue.

Speaker Agha Siraj Durrani said that the MPAs had nothing to do with the issue and said the local government department was responsible for carrying out the drive against stray dogs.

Standing committees

Separately, he also offered treasury and opposition mediation for settling the issue pertaining to formation of standing committees. “From the very first day, I wanted both opposition and treasury to sit and form standing committees with consultation,” he said adding that he could act like a bridge.

Mohammad Hussain Khan of MQM-P pointed out that no member of main opposition parties was part of standing committees and requested the speaker to form a special committee to further deliberate on the bills.

“In participatory democratic system, opposition even having a single seat is taken on board but not in brute democracy,” he noted.

PPP’s Mukesh Kumar Chawla said that the treasury members participated in the elections for standing committees but three main opposition parties — PTI, GDA and MQM-P— didn’t come for the polls.

It may be recalled that the PTI, GDA and MQM-P had refused to be part of standing committees until the opposition was given chairmanship of Public Accounts Committee.

On the other hand, the ruling PPP that had been keeping the PAC with it since 2008 turned down the opposition’s demand.

However, two other opposition parties — Tehreek-i-Labbaik Pakistan and lone member of Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal decided to join standing committees.

Meanwhile, the speaker ruled out of order a privilege motion of Syed Abdul Rasheed of MMA regarding “horse trading” of Sindh MPAs in the recently held Senate elections.

An adjournment motion moved by PPP’s Sadia Javed regarding increase in electricity prices was admitted and the speaker fixed it for discussion on Monday.

Legislation

The assembly unanimously passed The Sindh Public Private Partnership (Amendment) Bill, 2021. The amendment was aimed at attracting the foreign governments or entities owned by them to invest in public sector by exempting them from the competitive bidding and procurement process, objects and reasons of the bill read.

The Benazir Bhutto Shaheed University at Lyari Karachi (Amendment) Bill, 2020 was also passed while The Sindh Trusts (Amendment) Bill, 2021 was introduced and sent to standing committee for further deliberations.

Question Hour

Earlier, while replying to the lawmakers’ verbal and written queries during Question Hour, Information, Science and Technology Minister Mohammad Taimur Talpur said that the provincial government did not have any IT learning centre in the province. However, he said, the IT department was executing and implementing training programmes with IBA Karachi for employees of Sindh Secretariat for their capacity building.

Responding to a verbal question by PTI’s Rabia Azfar, he said that as many as 901 out of 1,200 employees had completed training and they had become computer literate.

In reply to another verbal question, the minister said that the IT department had launched websites of as many as 55 different provincial departments and all of them were functional.

Published in Dawn, March 26th, 2021